Every office project in India is priced the same way: per seat. The workstation vendor quotes per seat, the fit-out contractor budgets per seat, the finance team approves per seat, and the number is compared across three or four quotations before anyone signs. It is a sensible habit with one missing dimension. A per-seat price describes the day of purchase and nothing after it. We built a page on our site, Total Cost of Ownership, to add the dimension the per-seat number leaves out: the years. It compares two real products from our catalogue over a horizon you choose, keeps certain cost apart from estimated value, and reads the premium the way a procurement head would read it, as a return.
The per-seat number is missing a dimension
Two desk programmes from two Italian manufacturers we carry, quoted per seat, will differ on the first line of the comparison sheet. What the sheet does not show is how many times each will be bought over the life of the office. A programme that needs replacing within the tenure of a single lease is paid for twice; the per-seat price hides the second purchase. Add maintenance, and the order of the two quotations can change entirely. The page performs exactly that sum: quantity multiplied by years, with replacements and maintenance counted, so that the per-seat comparison becomes a per-seat-per-year comparison.
What the page asks you for
Eight inputs, none of them confidential. Category and brand first. Then the two products: a reference product, usually the lower quotation or the programme already in mind, and a product under evaluation. Then quantity per product, the number of employees involved, your sector, and the horizon in years, typically the lease tenure or the planning cycle of the organisation. Prices, useful life, warranty and maintenance assumptions are not typed by you: they come from the catalogue record, the same manufacturer-declared data published in the Product Passport that can be downloaded as a PDF from every product page. If your team uses the local term, an office table is simply an office desk in this comparison.
Quantity times years, the sum India rarely runs
The first result is the additional cost: how much more, or less, the evaluated product costs than the reference over the entire horizon, purchase plus replacements plus maintenance. This is the factual part of the page and it stands on its own. For a forty-seat floor over the length of a lease, it is the number a procurement head has always wanted and never had in the quotation stage, because no vendor quotes the second purchase. Read it before anything else. If the additional cost is zero or negative, the evaluated product does not carry a premium at all once the years are counted, and the rest of the page becomes a formality.
The return on the premium, read as a procurement head
Below the additional cost come the additional benefits, split into six categories: productivity, wellbeing, prestige, certifications, customisation and absenteeism. Then two figures that decide most meetings: the return on the premium, and the break-even, the number of months after which the price difference has been recovered, or the word immediate when there is nothing to recover. At the bottom, a verdict in two words, net advantage or net disadvantage, and when the premium is not recovered within the horizon you chose, the page states it plainly. A procurement head reads these the way they read any capital proposal: return first, then payback period, then the assumptions behind both.
Two lines the finance team will check
The three headline assumptions at the top of the page are estimates, labelled as estimates, each with its source printed beside it. For India, the absence assumption rests on a 2024 review in the Journal of Occupational Health across sixty-four studies, which found that 76 per cent of workers report a work-related musculoskeletal disorder in a year. The employer-brand assumption rests on the Human Spaces survey, in which 67 per cent of Indian office workers said office design influences their choice of employer, the highest share of any country surveyed. Behind both sits the World Green Building Council's observation that staff make up the overwhelming majority of an office's operating cost. The finance team will check two things: that these figures are sourced, and that they are never added to the certain cost. Both hold. Benefits live in their own panel; the cost line is untouched by them.
When the answer goes against the premium
A short horizon, a small quantity and a product whose advantage is chiefly aesthetic can produce a net disadvantage, and that is the correct result. A managing director's cabin furnished for a client-facing headquarters is not bought for its payback period, and the page will not pretend it was. The calculator is built to make two choices comparable, not to justify the more expensive one. Where it earns its place is on the operative floor, where quantity and years multiply and the second purchase of a short-lived programme is the largest hidden line in the budget.
For the design consultant and the project management consultant
In Indian corporate projects the design consultant specifies and the project management consultant defends the budget; the two are often asked to agree on a substitution in a single meeting. The page gives both a figure computed on the same inputs and the Product Passport gives both the document behind it. Office furniture and contract projects made in Italy look expensive on the per-seat line and look different once the tenure is entered. Per seat was never the wrong number; it was an incomplete one. Multiply it by the years the seats will actually serve, and the two consultants who rarely agree in the same meeting will at least be reading the same line.
Quick answers
How does the TCO calculator turn a per-seat price into a per-seat-per-year figure? By multiplying quantity by the horizon in years and counting replacements and maintenance over that period, using useful life and warranty data declared by the manufacturer. The additional cost it reports is the difference between two products over the whole horizon, not on the day of purchase.
Is the return on the premium based on certain cost or on estimates? On both, kept apart. The additional cost is factual: purchase, replacements and maintenance. The return and the break-even use the estimated benefits, which are labelled as estimates with their sources in a separate panel. The cost line is never altered by the benefits.
Where does the product data come from? From the catalogue record of each product: useful life, warranty and maintenance assumptions as declared by the manufacturer, identical to the Product Passport downloadable as a PDF from the product page. You enter only quantity, employees involved, sector and horizon.
Can the verdict favour the lower quotation? Yes. With a short horizon, few seats or advantages that are mainly aesthetic, the result may be a net disadvantage for the premium product. The page is designed to compare two choices on equal terms, not to argue for either of them.