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. How we count shows the working.
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.
If the answer to “we are drowning in admin” is always “automate it”, you are reading a sales page. There are three real options, two of them cost money every month forever, and which one is right depends entirely on whether the work has a shape.
£1,000–£1,800 / month
Every month, forever
A person can handle the exceptions, the judgement calls and the things nobody wrote down. If the work is varied and changes often, this is the right answer and no build will beat it.
It recurs every month for as long as the job exists, it stops when they are ill or leave, and the knowledge leaves with them. And the admin usually grows to fill the hours.
Unconfirmed — Typical UK cost of a part-time administrator, 22 September 2026 scan.
£25–£45 / hour, ongoing
Every month, forever
No employment overhead, and you can turn the hours up and down with the workload. Good for seasonal peaks and for work you do not want to systemise yet.
It also recurs forever, it costs more per hour than an employee, and you are paying someone to do the re-typing rather than removing the re-typing.
Unconfirmed — Range quoted for UK VA and contract admin rates, 22 September 2026 scan.
One-off, from £500
Once
It does not recur, it does not go on holiday, and it does the same thing at 2am on a Sunday as it does on a Tuesday morning. For repetitive, rule-shaped work it is usually cheaper inside the first year.
It only works on work that has a shape. If the job is really judgement wearing admin as a disguise, a build will automate the easy fifth and leave you the hard four fifths — and we will tell you when that is what we see.
Source: our own published prices.
The honest rule: if you could write the job down as a list of steps and hand it to a new starter, it can probably be built. If you could not — if half of it is knowing which customer to phone first — hire, and automate the parts around the judgement instead.
There are calculators for this decision. What a calculator cannot give you is a real company with a real number attached — so here are two, both live, both linked, and both with the basis for the figure written down rather than asserted.
Property · London planning data
≈ £27,000/yr — a full-time role's worth of checking
One person spent a full working day, every working day, checking council planning portals by hand. Nobody does now.
PlusRooms →
Field services · dispatch
≈ £10,000/yr in coordination time
A coordinator spent the day messaging field workers one at a time to see who was free. Jobs now claim themselves.
Marmadbir →
Both figures are salary-equivalents of work that stopped being done by hand. How we count sets out what each one measures and which parts we have not finished checking — which is the bit a decision guide never shows you.
We are in Chesterfield. If the job is somewhere we can get to — Derbyshire, Sheffield, Nottingham, the East Midlands generally — we will come and watch someone do it before we quote anything, because the difference between a job that can be built and one that only looks like it is usually visible in ten minutes at the desk.
The full comparison, including what agencies and freelancers charge and a year-one total with running costs, is on the pricing guide.
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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