The costs for the PIE Abacus have been deliberately made extremely straightforward and simple to calculate. The cost is £80 per annum, per Abacus (plus VAT). However, you will need a minimum of 10 Abacuses for a PIE Abacus account, which means that in practice, the cost starts at £800; and if you want 20 Abacuses, that will be £1,600; and so on, to whatever level.

Larger agency costs

So in any medium to large agency, with anything between ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred or more services, the cost would be £80 for each service that you wish to include, at this stage.

That is to say, you can start with a smaller number, for selected services; and increase the number you contract for at a later stage, as and when you wish to roll this out through more services or divisions of the agency.

To keep the accounting from getting too confusing, however, we do propose to allow a recalculation of numbers only every six months; so if you do plan to phase in a rollout of the PIE Abacus, it may be wise to allow initially for some incremental growth in take up over the first, more exploratory stages.

In any case, we would also recommend that any larger agency should keep in reserve some of its Abacuses, and contract for a few more than the number of services that it wants to include, for use for the agency as a whole.

This then allows you to create additional, more topic-specific Abacuses within your service, to help to get an overview of the state of play, across the whole agency, and analyse trends. The way that may work, in various scenarios, is spelled out HERE.

As a general rule, though, for a large agency, we would suggest anything between 10 and 20% of the total might be reserved for such additional (or ‘analytic’) Abacuses.

PIElink pages

The PIE Abacus costs (summary) : HERE

Larger agency costs : HERE

Smaller agencies’ costs : HERE

Cost sharing : HERE

Individual user Abacuses : HERE

Service users' PIE assessments : HERE

Library items

The PIE Abacus - essential briefing for PIE leads (and others in comparable roles )' : HERE

'Weighing the costs and 'value added' of the PIE Abacus' : HERE

The PIE Abacus

The simplest, most effective way to evaluate and improve your PIE from Daniel O'Brien on Vimeo.

For more on the PIE Abacus, see:

The PIE Abacus - an on-line Pizazz (summary) : HERE

All PIE Abacus FAQs : HERE