Home >> Metrics Summary

Sales per Person

Description: Sales per person is one of the most closely watched of all performance measures.  It is based on the assumption that employees are at the core of a company’s profitability, and so high degrees of efficiency in this area are bound to result in strong profitability.  It is also a standard benchmark in many industries.

Formula: To calculate sales per person, divide revenue for a full year by the total number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) in the company.  An FTE is the combination of staffing that equals a forty-hour week.  For example, two half-time employees would be counted as one FTE.  The formula is as follows:

Annualized Revenue
Total Full Time Equivalents

A variation on this ratio is to only divide annual revenues by those FTEs who can be categorized as direct labor.  This measures the productivity of those personnel who are directly connected to the manufacture of a company’s products or services.  This measure should be used with care, since it is not always easy to determine which employees can be categorized as direct labor and which ones fall into the overhead category instead.  The formula is as follows:

Annualized Revenue
Total Direct Labor Full Time Equivalents

Example: The operations manager of the Twirling Washing Machine Company wants to determine the sales per person for his company, both for all staff and just the direct labor personnel.  The company has annual revenues of $4,200,000.  Its headcount is as follows:

In total, the company has 54 employees.  However, if we assume that the part-time staff all work ½ time, then the eight part-time positions can be reduced to four FTEs, which decreases the total headcount to 50 personnel.  Another issue is what constitutes direct labor personnel – the company has a group of clearly defined direct labor personnel, as well as a materials handling support staff and two production supervisors.  The company can use any combination of these groups for its sales per direct labor measurement, as long as it consistently applies the measurement over time.  However, the technically correct approach is to include in the measure any positions that are required for the proper completion of production efforts, which would require the inclusion of all three categories of labor.  If this approach were not used, the person doing the measuring might be tempted to artificially inflate the measurement results by shifting direct labor personnel into other labor categories that fall just outside the definition.

The result of these measurements is overall sales per employee of $84,000 (which is $4,200,000 in revenues, divided by 50 employees) and sales per direct labor employee of $135,484 (which is $4,200,000 in revenues, divided by 31 employees).  The 31 employee figure is derived by adding 22 direct labor personnel to the three FTEs represented by the six part-time direct labor personnel, plus the production supervisors and material handling staff.

Cautions: The sales per person formula is subject to a high degree of variation, depending upon how personnel are counted.  For example, shifting away from employees to an outsourced solution or to the in-house use of temporary employees can artificially reduce the number of FTEs, as can the use of overtime by a smaller number of employees.  Also, comparing the number of FTEs to revenue has a less direct bearing on profitability than comparing revenues to the total of all salaries and wages expenses; for example, one company with a large headcount but low pay per person may be more profitable than a company having a lesser headcount but a much higher salary per person.  Also, some capital-intensive industries have so few employees in relation to the sales volume generated that this measure has much less significance than other measures, such as sales to fixed assets.

Similar Ratios

Sales backlog ratio