Manual work hides in salaries
Nobody gets an invoice for "time spent re-typing orders." Manual work is buried inside payroll, spread across several people, a few minutes at a time. That's why it survives for years.
Add it up and it's often a meaningful share of somebody's salary, spent on work a computer could do.
The visible cost: hours
Start with a simple calculation for each repetitive task:
- Hours per week across everyone who does it
- Times the loaded hourly cost (wage plus taxes and benefits)
- Times the weeks you work in a year
A task that takes five people half an hour a day adds up to well over 600 hours a year. At a loaded cost of $40 an hour, that's more than $25,000. Most businesses have several tasks like that.
The hidden costs
Hours are the easy part. The costs that don't show up in the math are often bigger.
- Errors. Re-typed data gets mistyped. A wrong address, a missed digit on an invoice, an order shipped twice. Each error costs time to find and fix, and sometimes a customer.
- Delays. Quotes that wait until someone has time. Invoices that go out at month end instead of the day the work was done. Slow work means slower cash.
- Dropped balls. Follow-ups that depend on someone remembering eventually get forgotten.
- Owner time. In small businesses, the owner often does the manual work nobody else knows how to do.
- Turnover. Good people leave jobs full of tedious work. Training their replacement on an undocumented manual process costs more.
Which automations pay back fastest
Not every automation is worth building. The best payback comes from tasks that are:
- Frequent. Daily beats monthly.
- Rules-based. The same steps most of the time.
- Connected to money. Quotes, invoices, collections and orders.
- Already digital. Emails, forms, PDFs and app data.
Divide the cost of the automation by the monthly value of the time it saves. That's your payback in months. If a fixed-fee automation costs a few thousand dollars and saves a few hundred dollars of time a month, it pays back within the year, and keeps paying after that.
Why "we'll get to it" never comes
Manual workflows persist because fixing them takes time from the same people who are too busy doing them. The way out is to pick one process, put a number on it, fix it properly and use the time it frees up to fix the next one.
Where to start
Our free automation assessment does this math for you in about three minutes. Pick the tasks your team repeats, set rough hours and your hourly cost, and it shows the hours and dollars at stake, your best candidates and the payback on each.
Take the free automation ROI assessment
When you've picked the first one, we build it as a fixed-fee sprint on your existing tools, documented and handed over. See consulting and automation services.