Income Goal Calculator
The mirror image: start from the income you want to keep and the rate you already charge, and solve for the billings and hours the goal requires — checked against the billable hours you genuinely have.
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The Get Paid Kit · Planning
Free pipeline income forecaster
An annual goal is a wish until the pipeline is priced against it. This forecaster prices it: what you have already earned, what is contracted but not yet delivered, and what your live proposals are honestly worth once each is weighted by the chance it actually closes. On the defaults below — a $72,000 goal, $41,000 earned, $12,000 contracted and $19,500 of proposals weighted down to $6,150 — the year forecasts $59,150: 82.2% of the goal, a gap of $12,850, which over four remaining months is $3,212.50 of new work to win each month — about two average-sized wins. It is not the income goal calculator, which starts from the goal and solves for the billings and hours it demands. This one starts from the pipeline and solves for the year you are actually building. Put your own year in.
Runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, sent to a server or stored anywhere except this device. The figures exist only in this page. This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice.
Your year so far
Where the numbers come from: the goal belongs beside the offer, the rate and the capacity it dictates — the one-page business plan holds all of it on a single page. Earned and contracted live in your invoicing. The probabilities live in your sent folder, and in your memory of how your proposals usually end.
The year’s forecast
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Enter your goal, your earnings and your pipeline.
—New work to win per remaining month to close the gap exactly.
—Wins are counted at your average proposal size.
| Earned so far this year | — |
| Contracted, not yet earned | — |
| Proposal 1, weighted | — |
| Proposal 2, weighted | — |
| Proposal 3, weighted | — |
| Probability-weighted pipeline | — |
| Forecast for the year | — |
| Annual income goal | — |
| Contracted share of the goal | — |
| Forecast coverage of the goal | — |
| Gap still to win | — |
| Months remaining | — |
| New work to win per month | — |
| Average proposal size | — |
| Wins needed at that size | — |
Enter the year — its goal, its earnings and its live proposals — and this line reads the forecast back to you.
Worked example
A freelancer is aiming at $72,000 this year. Four months remain. They have earned $41,000, hold $12,000 of signed work still to deliver, and have three proposals out: $6,000 they rate a coin flip, $4,500 cooling at 30%, and a $9,000 long shot at 20%. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:
| Annual income goal | $72,000.00 |
| Earned so far | $41,000.00 |
| Contracted, not yet earned | $12,000.00 |
| Proposal 1 — $6,000 at 50% | $3,000.00 |
| Proposal 2 — $4,500 at 30% | $1,350.00 |
| Proposal 3 — $9,000 at 20% | $1,800.00 |
| Probability-weighted pipeline | $6,150.00 |
| Forecast for the year | $59,150.00 |
| Contracted share of the goal | 16.7% |
| Forecast coverage of the goal | 82.2% |
| Gap still to win | $12,850.00 |
| Months remaining | 4 |
| New work to win per month | $3,212.50 |
| Average proposal size | $6,500.00 |
| Wins needed at that size | 1.98 — call it 2 |
| Verdict | Behind — the pipeline is the job now |
Read the shape of it. Nearly three-quarters of the year is already real — $53,000 earned or signed — and the weighted pipeline adds an honest $6,150 on top of it. What remains is not a mystery, it is a quota: $12,850, at $3,212.50 a month, roughly two more wins at the size this freelancer usually proposes. That is the whole difference the forecast makes. “Behind on the year” is a feeling. Two wins in four months is a plan.
The method
How the forecast works
- Three kinds of money, in descending order of certainty. Earned is finished — delivered, invoiced, no longer a forecast at all. Contracted is signed but undelivered: nearly certain, and still dependent on you delivering it and the client staying willing and able to pay. Proposed is a price attached to a hope. The forecast adds all three only after each is stated at its own level of truth — the first two at full value, the third discounted by its probability. Adding raw proposal totals to earned money is how a $40,000 year gets forecast at $90,000.
- The probabilities are yours — keep them honest. No database knows your close rate; the weights on this page are your judgment, entered by you, and the calculator can only do honest arithmetic on them. The graveyard of freelance forecasts is the stale 50%: a proposal that has gone quiet for a month is not a coin flip, it is a slow no wearing a hopeful number. Revisit the weights whenever a proposal changes temperature — a reply, a meeting, a silence — not just on the day you happen to rerun the tool.
- The gap becomes a pace. A raw gap is dread; the same gap divided by the months remaining is a work order. $3,212.50 of new work to win per month is a number a week can be planned around — so many proposals, so many follow-ups, so many conversations started while they can still close inside the year. And the wins that close the gap will be priced at the rates you actually charge: the rate card is where those prices live, decided once, in advance, instead of negotiated down in a anxious month.
- Winning is only half the job. A pipeline that closes still has to be delivered inside the same months, by the same person. Before chasing the gap, check that the wins fit: the utilization calculator prices your real billable capacity — the week you genuinely have, at the share of it clients pay for. A forecast that assumes winning everything and delivering everything in the same four months has not removed the problem; it has moved it to December.
- The mirror image of the income goal calculator. The income goal calculator starts from the goal and solves backwards — the billings the goal requires and the hours inside them. This page starts from the pipeline and solves forwards — the year the pipeline is actually building. Run both, a few times a year, and the year has to agree with itself from both directions: the goal priced against capacity, and the pipeline priced against the goal.
Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate, not financial advice. The probabilities are your own judgment, entered by you — the calculator does honest arithmetic on them but cannot make them accurate. The verdict bands — a forecast covering the goal reads as on track, 85% as close, 60% as behind, below that as a year to reset — are this page’s working frame, not a standard.
Two neighbouring questions, two neighbouring tools. The goal itself — what it demands in billings and hours — belongs to the income goal calculator. A single client’s worth across the whole relationship is the client lifetime value calculator’s question; this page prices the year, not the client. And when the verdict here says reset, the honest next step is not a bigger effort against a fictional number — it is the smaller true goal, written down on the one-page business plan beside the offer, the rate and the capacity that will actually serve it.
Questions
Pipeline income forecaster questions
Your own close rate, and nothing else’s. Count your last ten proposals: if four were signed, your honest starting number is 40% — lower it for proposals that have gone quiet, because silence is information. There is no industry percentage worth borrowing; a borrowed rate makes the forecast somebody else’s year. Start pessimistic — a forecast that beats itself is a pleasant surprise, while one built on optimism is a December problem — and recalibrate the number each quarter, when you review the year anyway.
Yes — while it is signed, scheduled and alive. A contract is a promise with paperwork, and discounting it on a forecast would punish the most certain money you have. The honesty line is aliveness: if a contracted project has gone quiet — the kickoff keeps slipping, the contact has left, the budget is “under review” — it has quietly stopped being contracted. Move it down into the proposals with a probability attached, and let the forecast tell the truth a few months earlier than the cancellation email would.
No — reset, which is a different thing. A goal the pipeline cannot reach is information, not failure, and it arrives while there is still time to use it: shrink the goal to what the honest forecast supports, and plan the year against the true number — savings, tax set-aside and all. Chasing a fictional goal produces fictional decisions: spending as if it were coming, declining good work that “doesn’t move the needle”. The one-page business plan is where the reset goal belongs — written down, with the offer, rate and capacity that serve it.
Planning
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