Free tool
What your flat coaching package really pays per hour
Enter the fee you quote and the hours an engagement actually consumes, including the unscheduled calls and the document chasing, and see the rate you are working for.
Free tool, no sign up
How many separation cases can you actually track at once
Count the deadline checks and document chases your open cases generate each month, then compare that against the admin hours you really have.
Nobody misses a deadline because they forgot it exists. They miss it because twelve cases each needed four small checks that week and there were four hours to do them in. The load is made of minutes, which is exactly why it stays invisible until something slips on a disclosure window.
This planner turns the minutes into hours. Enter your open cases, how many deadline points each one needs checked in a month, how many document chases each one generates, and how much of your week is genuinely available for case work outside sessions. The result is the caseload your current admin time supports.
Your result
Tracking hours your caseload needs each month
18.6
Deadline checks and document chases across every open file.
Tracking hours per case each month
1.6
What one separation costs you in pure case keeping time.
Cases your admin hours support
11
The number of open files your available hours can genuinely track.
Monthly hours you are short
1.3
The gap that turns into evening work or a missed check.
If your sustainable caseload sits below the files you are carrying, the fix is fewer checks per case or faster checks, not a firmer promise to yourself.
Why quiet cases still cost you
A case waiting four months on a court date feels like it costs nothing. It does not. It still needs someone to confirm the hearing has not moved, to notice that the mandatory disclosure clock is running, and to send the client a note so she does not assume you have forgotten her. Those checks are short and they are constant.
Set the deadline points to one and the chases to zero and you will see the floor cost of an idle file. Multiply it by the number of quiet cases you are holding and you have the reason your Fridays disappear even in a slow month.
Cutting minutes rather than cases
Most coaches respond to an overloaded number by promising to take fewer clients. The faster fix is the minutes per check. Twelve minutes is what a check costs when you have to open a folder, scroll a thread and reconstruct where things stood. It drops sharply when every case has one deadline page with the check date already written on it.
Do the same with the chasing. Batched weekly requests against an ordered document list take a fraction of the time of scattered one at a time reminders, because the client answers once instead of five times and you file once instead of five times.
Questions about this calculator
How do I know how many deadline points a case really has?
Most US separations produce a handful of recurring ones: the service window, the mandatory disclosure period, any waiting period your state requires, hearing dates and, when retirement accounts divide, the transfer that continues after the decree. Four checks a month is a reasonable working average for an active file.
Are session hours included in this?
No, and that is deliberate. This planner measures only the case keeping work that happens between sessions, which is the load that has no calendar slot of its own. Enter only the hours you have left after your scheduled client time.
My sustainable caseload came out lower than the cases I am carrying. Now what?
Two levers move it fast. Cut the minutes per check by giving each case one deadline page instead of a search through email, and batch document requests weekly instead of sending them as they occur to you. If the gap stays wide after that, the caseload is genuinely too large for the hours.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The separation binder setup checklist
A working checklist for the four stages of a separation engagement, written for the coach or mediator who has to keep the documents, the dates and the decisions in one place.
The hours sitting behind that figure
That result came out of your own admin hours, and those are precisely the hours a case binder exists to shorten. Fifteen minutes on a call is enough to show you the same separation with a check date on every deadline and one home for every bank statement, instead of a search back through email. Bring the number you just got and we will work from it rather than from a generic example.