Six hours a week of re-keying, chasing and checking costs about £5,500 a year for every person doing it. Not in lost productivity, in salary — money you have already paid, spent on work a system could do instead.
Most business owners can feel this without being able to price it. Below is the arithmetic, the three places the hours almost always go, and how to tell which one is worth fixing first.
Take one recurring task. Count the hours a week it genuinely takes — ask the person doing it, not the person who thinks they know. Multiply by what that hour costs you, including employer's National Insurance and pension, then by 46 working weeks.
That is what you are paying, every year, to keep doing it by hand. Now do it for the three or four tasks you already suspect. The total is usually the part that surprises people.
Then compare it to a one-off cost to remove it. If the job does not pay back inside about eighteen months, leave it alone — that is a genuine answer, and one we give often.
One task, one person
£5,520/year
For one task, done by one person. Four people doing something similar and you are past £20,000 a year without anyone ever putting it on a budget line.
For comparison
One client had a full working day of manual checking removed — worth roughly £27,000 a year, against a one-off build. Savings stated as actual costs eliminated or salary-equivalents of the manual work replaced.
We have mapped enough of these now that the pattern is boring. The specifics change; the shape does not.
01
An enquiry arrives by email. Someone types it into the CRM. When it becomes a job it gets typed into the scheduling sheet, and when it is invoiced it gets typed into the accounts package. Nobody thinks of this as a task — it is just what you do between the real work.
Usually the largest single sink, and the easiest to remove, because the data already exists in a system somewhere.
What it looks like fixed: The record is created once and everything downstream updates from it. Typically a few days of work.
02
Quotes that went quiet. Invoices past due. Timesheets not submitted. Documents not returned. Every one of these needs someone to notice it has not happened, remember to follow up, and keep a mental list of who owes what.
The cost is not only the chasing time — it is the quotes that go cold and the invoices paid late because nobody noticed in the first place.
What it looks like fixed: The system notices and sends the nudge. A person only gets involved when the nudge has not worked.
03
Numbers pulled by hand from three or four places, pasted into a spreadsheet, formatted, sanity-checked and emailed round. Weekly or monthly, always urgent, always the same steps, and always done by someone senior enough that their time is expensive.
Often the most expensive per hour, because the person who understands the numbers well enough to assemble them is rarely junior.
What it looks like fixed: The report builds itself on a schedule and lands in the inbox already correct.
None of these is a crisis on its own. Three or more together usually means the processes stopped fitting the business a while ago and nobody had time to notice.
The mistake is automating the task that annoys you most rather than the one costing the most. They are rarely the same, and the difference is usually thousands a year.
A Process Audit maps where the hours actually go, ranks the opportunities by return, and gives you a fixed-price quote for each. £1,500, one to two weeks, credited in full against a build if you proceed. The written report is yours either way.
See what the audit coversOr start smaller
Not ready to pay for anything? Send us the job your team keeps doing by hand and we'll reply with what could be automated, the easiest first build, a rough price range and an honest view on whether it is worth doing at all.
Free automation opportunity auditOr just call 01246 923041
Describe it in a sentence or two. We'll come back within 24 hours with an honest read on whether it is worth automating and roughly what it would cost.
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