What is that process costing you right now?
Answer six questions about a process your team runs manually. You will get the annual cost, the amount automation removes, the payback period and the three-year return — before you speak to anyone.
- Six inputs, all of them yours
- People, hours per week, fully loaded hourly cost, error rate, working weeks and achievable coverage. Nothing is estimated on your behalf.
- Payback measured after running cost
- Most calculators ignore the cost of owning the automation. This one deducts it before calculating payback, so the answer is not flattered.
- It will tell you when not to automate
- If the process is too small to justify a build, the calculator says so. A project that cannot be defended is worse for both of us than no project.
- Shareable and yours to keep
- Every scenario has a URL. Send it to your CFO, sit on it, or bring it to a call and we will pressure-test the assumptions.
Your process
Start with the process that most of your people touch most often.
How many people spend time on this work today, including anyone who only touches it for approvals or checks.
Time spent on the manual work itself per person per week. Include checking, chasing and re-keying.
Salary plus benefits, overhead and equipment. A $75,000 salary is roughly $45 per hour loaded.
Share of transactions that need correcting. Most manual processes sit between 2% and 8%.
48 strips out public holidays and leave. Drop this if the process is seasonal.
The share of the process that can realistically run without a person. We rarely commit above 85% before an assessment.
Net annual savings
$75,235
After subtracting $30,000 a year to run the automation, on a Single process scope.
This is a viable automation with a defensible case
The payback sits in the normal range for an enterprise automation engagement. An assessment would confirm the measured baseline and tighten these numbers before any build commitment.
Payback period
13.6 months
3-year ROI
166%
Hours reclaimed / yr
2,339
Capacity reclaimed
1.2 FTE
Cost today
$150K
Labour plus rework
Annual savings
$105K
Before run cost
3-year net
$141K
After implementation
Where the money goes today
At 70% coverage, the automation removes $105,235 of the $150,336 this process costs today, and costs $30,000 a year to operate.
Cumulative position over three years
$85K build · $3K/mo runThis is a model, not a quote. It assumes labour cost is the only cost removed, that rework effort is twice the original handling time, and that run cost is fixed at the selected scope. An assessment replaces every one of those assumptions with your measured numbers.
How we calculate this
- Cost today — annual hours (people × hours per week × working weeks) at the fully loaded hourly rate, plus rework: annual hours × error rate × rework effort, at the same rate.
- Savings — both labour and rework cost are reduced by the automation coverage figure, because coverage is a property of the process rather than of a single cost line.
- Net savings — gross savings minus the annual run cost for the selected scope. Platform hosting, support and maintenance are included there.
- Payback — the implementation cost divided by monthly net savings. It is measured after running costs, so a system that only just pays back its savings does not appear to pay back its build.
- Three-year ROI — three years of net savings minus the implementation cost, divided by the implementation cost.
Deliberately excluded: revenue upside from faster cycle times, reduced attrition in automated roles, and avoided hiring at growth. Those are real but difficult to attribute, so the case stands without them.
A model is not a measurement
The calculator is built on assumptions you supplied. An assessment replaces them with observed volumes, timed cycle times, reconciled cost per transaction and a real integration assessment — which is what turns an indicative range into a number your finance team can sign off.