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What does that manual process actually cost you?
Four numbers gets you the order of magnitude. Use it before anyone quotes you for an automation, and use it again afterwards to check whether their business case holds up.
Four numbers. Everything is an estimate until we measure the real workflow — this is the arithmetic, not a promise.
Everyone who touches it, including part of someone’s week.
Across the whole team, not per person.
Time a real sample, including the awkward ones. Estimates run low.
Salary plus taxes, benefits and overhead — roughly 1.3× base pay.
We plan against 60% on a first workflow. Anything above 80% assumes very stable inputs, so treat it as the optimistic end.
What this process costs today
$7,404/month
195 hours of work a month, or $88,852 a year.
Estimated capacity value if 60% is removed
$53,311/year
About 117 hours a month — roughly 0.7 full-time equivalents of capacity handed back to the team.
This is capacity, not cash. It becomes money when it absorbs growth you would otherwise hire for, clears a backlog that is costing you revenue, or moves experienced people onto work only they can do. We will not call it guaranteed savings, because it isn’t.
We validate this against the actual workflow and send back the real numbers.
Time a real sample
Do not estimate. Time ten actual items including the awkward ones — estimates of your own process run low, consistently and in the same direction.
Use loaded cost
Salary plus employer taxes, benefits and overhead. Roughly 1.3× base pay, not base pay itself.
Do not assume 100%
Something always stays manual. Plan for a residual of at least 20% on a first workflow, and treat anything better as upside.
Want the full method behind these numbers? Read how we calculate ROI — including the two terms most business cases leave out. The worked automation ROI example shows the same method with real numbers.
Questions
About these numbers
Does recovered employee time equal money saved?
Not automatically, and we will not pretend otherwise. Removing 400 hours of manual work a month gives you 400 hours of capacity. It becomes money when that capacity absorbs growth you would otherwise have hired for, or when it stops a backlog costing you revenue. We call it estimated capacity value, not guaranteed savings.
How do you calculate the baseline?
Volume times minutes per item times the loaded hourly cost of the people doing it, plus the cost of rework and errors where we can observe it. We measure a real sample rather than accepting an estimate, because estimates of one’s own process are almost always wrong in the same direction.
What ongoing cost should we plan for?
Three things: infrastructure and model usage, which is usually small and metered; maintenance, because vendors change APIs and models change behaviour; and improvement work, if you want the system to keep getting better. We quote these separately so you can see what is fixed and what is variable.
What payback period is realistic?
For a high-volume, rule-stable workflow, the implementation typically pays back within a few months of the capacity it frees. For low-volume or judgement-heavy work it can be much longer, or never — which is exactly why we measure before building instead of after.
Want the real number instead of the estimate?
We measure a sample of the actual workflow, replace every estimate above with a measurement, and tell you honestly whether it is worth building.
- For businesses with $5M to $30M in revenue
- No long-term commitment
- Start with one workflow
- Keep ownership of everything we build