What does that manualprocess actually cost?
Three numbers get 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.
Three numbers. Everything is an estimate until we measure the real workflow - this is the arithmetic, not a promise.
Across the whole team, not per person. Between 5 and 2,000.
Time a real sample, including the awkward ones. Estimates run low. Between 1 and 180.
Salary plus taxes, benefits and overhead - roughly 1.3× base pay. Between 15 and 200.
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, and the leftovers are the awkward ones. The slider above plans against removing 60% on a first workflow, which leaves 40% with a person - 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 automation ROI method works through the same arithmetic term by term, including the payback formula.
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?
Monthly volume times minutes per item, divided by sixty to turn those minutes into hours, 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?
The test we apply is whether the build repays inside a year on a workflow whose rules are stable. If it needs three years of perfect operation to break even, the assumptions will not survive that long. For low-volume or judgement-heavy work the answer is often that it never pays back - 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 established businesses from $5M in revenue, and products that are live, business-critical or already depended on
- No long-term commitment
- Start with one workflow or one system
- Keep ownership of everything we build