Real tools built by someone who has spent 20 years running the numbers for real.
Most financial calculators are built by developers who understand code but have never managed a payroll, negotiated a grant budget, or tried to figure out whether they could actually afford to hire someone. The result is tools that do the arithmetic but miss the point — they give you a number without telling you what to do with it.
I built CalcWonk because I kept running into that problem in my own work. In my role leading a nonprofit organization, I manage a multi-million dollar budget, oversee payroll and HR benefits, manage grants from multiple funders simultaneously, and make hiring decisions that directly affect both our staff and the communities we serve. Every time I needed to make one of those decisions, I wanted a tool that would give me the full picture — not just the arithmetic, but the context and the insight to act on it.
That tool didn't exist. So I built it.
"The best financial decisions come from understanding the complete picture — not just the number on the surface, but everything underneath it that most people never calculate."
— Brian Schmidt, Founder of CalcWonkEvery calculator on CalcWonk is built around a real decision I've faced or watched others face — the true cost of hiring someone, whether a contractor makes more sense than an employee, what turnover actually costs an organization, whether a loan makes financial sense at its real total cost. These aren't theoretical exercises. They're the questions that keep business owners and nonprofit leaders up at night, and they deserve better tools than a generic spreadsheet.
Brian Schmidt is the founder of CalcWonk and currently leads a Missouri-based nonprofit organization focused on policy and systems change, where he manages multi-million dollar budgets, raises and administers grants, oversees payroll and HR benefits, and has hired both employees and contractors across the organization's growth.
Before his current role, Brian served as Executive Director of the Missouri General Assembly's Joint Committee on Tax Policy, where he assisted legislators with analyzing and crafting tax and economic development policies. He subsequently founded Missouri Wonk, a public policy analysis consulting firm, where he led projects spanning tax policy, healthcare reform, education, transportation, housing, and neighborhood revitalization.
Brian has developed a child care cost-sharing model that facilitates sharing of costs between employers, families, philanthropy, and the public sector — a program that has been featured in the Washington Post and recognized in a report from the Buffett Early Childhood Institute.
He holds a Master's in Public Affairs with an emphasis in public policy, and brings a data-driven approach to everything he builds — including the tools on this site.
Every calculator on CalcWonk is built around a real financial decision — not just a formula. Results include context, benchmarks, and plain-English insight so you know what to do with the number, not just what it is. Your numbers are never stored or shared. Calculations happen in your browser, and your PDF is generated on your device — not our servers.
CalcWonk earns revenue through affiliate recommendations. When a calculator naturally leads to a product recommendation — payroll software after an employee cost calculation, accounting software after a profit margin analysis — we may include an affiliate link. Those relationships never influence our calculator results or editorial content. We only recommend products we believe are genuinely useful for the decision at hand.
Full details are in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Our calculators are built around the financial decisions that matter most to small businesses and individuals.
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