In this article we cover the core concepts of the extension:

Meetings can either catalyze productivity or become a drain on resources. Empower your meeting organizers with factual clarity on estimated meeting costs using Flowtrace's Chrome extension.

Our extension integrates with the rest of the Flowtrace Meeting Analytics ecosystem to provide accurate cost estimates for direct and group-invited meetings. Simply log in using your Google account to use your customized organizational cost configuration.

Experience the transformative impact of cost transparency. By providing tangible estimates on meeting costs, our tool ensures your team is aware of the time and financial implications of meetings. This awareness encourages a mindful approach to scheduling, potentially saving your organization significant resources.

We have made it easy to install the extension to individuals, or whole organizations.

The extension is available from Chrome Extension Webstore and can be installed by anyone. The link to the extension is here: Meeting Cost for Google Calendar.

Google Workspace administrators have the option to install the extension to their Workspace user Chrome profiles, and this is the mechanism you can use to install the extension across the team. Here's a link Centrally Managed Deployment article covering these steps

The extension has 3 main modes of operation: unauthenticated, authenticated free, and authenticated premium. To utilize organization settings configured in Flowtrace, your users need to authenticate and verify their identity before we can use the salary and working time configuration securely in your paid account.

Here's what you can see in the extension when viewing a meeting in the calendar view.

This section contains centrally managed rules to validate the meeting invites before they are sent, when meeting is updated, and shown on collapsed mode when in the calendar view. Requires scale account.

A free text section to remind your meeting organizers what's important in your meeting policy. It's a good to remind people what are the most important aspects of a great meeting like "Always send an agenda", "Use optional field for big meetings", and "Keep meetings short and concise.". Requires team, or scale account.

A dynamically updated cost estimate of the meeting across the calendar. This estimate raises the awareness of the costs associated with meetings and makes people take care of the efficient use of their meeting time. Available in all account types.

This dialog is only available when you send or save meeting with more than 2 people involved. The dialog will ask you to confirm you want to send the meeting if we identify there are rules being violated or the cost of the meeting is above the configured threshold.

We have available rules to most of the invite fields and can configure time based rules with time zones or local times. Please see below screenshot for example rules available.

Requires scale account.

This section shows centrally managed rules which are being violated at the given time user edits the meeting invite giving them immediate feedback against your meeting policy. Requires scale account.

A free text section to remind your meeting organizers what's important in your meeting policy. Requires team, or scale account.

A dynamically updated cost estimate of the meeting across the calendar. This estimate raises the awareness of the costs associated with meetings and makes people take care of the efficient use of their meeting time. Available in all account types.

Unauthenticated operation uses default meeting cost configuration to arrive at an estimate and is based on USD. The meeting cost values are derived from the average hours worked in the tech industry and the average salary in the tech industry.

The authenticated operation uses default meeting cost configuration to arrive at an estimate and is based on your timezone-defined country and currency combination. The meeting cost values are derived from average hours worked in the tech industry and average salary in the tech industry (these averages are based on your country if the information is available).

Centrally authenticated operation uses the meeting cost configuration your organization has configured in the Flowtrace platform and secures this with managed key you deploy to your managed Chrome Browsers. The security, and the estimates are the most accurate reflection of meeting costs when your user's don't need to login or configure the tool themselves. Contact your account manager for information how to deploy the security configuration for your centrally managed Chrome browsers.

You can configure cost estimates in Flowtrace -> Settings -> Account Settings

Please contact Flowtrace to configure the rules and meeting policy to your Chrome Extension.

Uninstalling the meeting cost extension is easy, and it depends on how you installed it in the first place.