Meeting Cost for Outlook is a Flowtrace add-in that integrates directly into Microsoft Outlook to provide real-time meeting cost calculations and policy validation when creating meeting invites.

The tool enhances awareness of meeting expenses by showing organizers the true cost of their meetings based on attendee salaries and time investment. It also validates meetings against your company's meeting culture policy, ensuring organizers follow best practices like including agendas, setting appropriate durations, and inviting only necessary participants.

The add-in provides immediate feedback during the meeting creation process, making it easy to optimize meetings before they're scheduled.

Meeting cost visibility in Outlook is critical because it brings immediate awareness to the financial impact of meetings at the exact moment they're being created. Most organizations are unaware that they spend thousands of dollars weekly on ineffective meetings.

By displaying real-time costs based on attendee salaries and meeting duration, the Outlook add-in helps meeting organizers make more thoughtful decisions about who to invite, how long meetings should run, and whether the meeting is truly necessary. This immediate feedback loop drives behavioral change and helps build a more cost-conscious meeting culture.

Additionally, when organizers see that a 1-hour meeting with 8 people costs $500, they become more selective about attendees and more focused on meeting outcomes.

The Outlook add-in delivers multiple organizational benefits including cost reduction through increased awareness of meeting expenses at the point of creation, improved meeting quality through policy validation that ensures meetings follow company best practices, time savings by preventing unnecessary or poorly planned meetings before they're scheduled, enhanced accountability as organizers see the real financial impact of their meeting decisions, and cultural transformation through consistent reinforcement of meeting standards.

The tool also provides configurable cost alerting for expensive meetings, customizable validation rules that can be tailored to your organization's needs, corporate language support for global teams, and seamless integration that doesn't disrupt existing Outlook workflows.

Organizations typically see improved meeting efficiency and reduced meeting costs within weeks of implementation.

Common use cases include executive meeting optimization where leadership can see the true cost of high-level meetings and make more strategic decisions about time allocation, project management where teams can validate that project meetings follow efficiency standards and include necessary participants only, budget management for departments to track and control meeting-related expenses through real-time cost visibility, policy enforcement across the organization to ensure consistent meeting standards without manual oversight, and new employee onboarding to teach proper meeting etiquette through built-in validation prompts.

The tool is also valuable for remote and hybrid teams who need extra structure around virtual meetings, sales teams who want to optimize client meeting investments, and HR departments implementing company-wide meeting culture improvements.

Meeting validation in Outlook works through intelligent, real-time analysis during the meeting creation process. When a user creates a meeting invite, the Flowtrace add-in automatically checks the meeting details against your company's predefined meeting policy rules. These validation rules can include requirements for meeting agendas, appropriate meeting durations, optimal number of attendees, mandatory preparation time, and specific meeting types that require approval.

The system provides instant feedback through summary reminders of your company meeting policy with links to internal documentation, configurable alerts for meetings that exceed cost thresholds, and customizable validation messages that guide organizers toward better meeting practices.

Organizations can choose from pre-set validation rules or create custom rules based on their specific needs, with support for time-based and meeting-type conditions that adapt to different organizational requirements.