How much is manual work costing me?
Pick one task your team does by hand, on repeat. Enter four numbers you already know. You get a yearly cost in dollars instead of a hunch.
What does one workflow cost you a year?
3 hrs × 2 people × 52 runs × $65/hr =
$20,280 a year
The defaults are an illustrative example: a weekly task, two people, three hours, $65 an hour. Replace them with your own numbers.
What this number leaves out
The calculator counts hours only. Three costs sit on top of it:
Errors
The cost of fixing what gets copied wrong. A wrong figure in a client report costs a correction and some trust.
Delay
What waits while the work gets done by hand. A new inquiry that sits for three days may go to someone else.
One-person risk
What happens when the one person who knows how is out. A vacation turns a routine task into a scramble.
These are hard to price, so the calculator leaves them out. Treat your total as the floor, not the full cost.
The formula, in plain words
Annual cost equals hours each run, times people involved, times runs per year, times loaded hourly cost.
- Hours each run: start to finish, including the back-and-forth when something doesn't match.
- People involved: everyone who touches the task, including whoever checks it.
- Runs per year: about 250 for daily, 52 for weekly, 12 for monthly.
- Loaded hourly cost: salary plus taxes and benefits, divided by working hours. A rough rule of thumb: salary divided by 2,080, plus about a quarter. Use your real figure if you have it.
Is your number worth fixing?
Compare the yearly cost with the price of fixing the workflow once. A workflow automation sprint is $3,500 to $8,000 at launch pricing. For a worked example and three questions that decide it, read What does manual data entry cost a small business?
Put a real number on it.
Free, about four minutes, and read by Raquel herself.