What Is That Manual Task Costing You?
Answer three questions and find out what a process takes out of your business each year, in hours and in money. No sign-up, no email, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Work It OutThe Calculator
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Your result
These are your numbers, not an average. The only figure that carries an outside assumption is the saving range, and its basis is set out below.
Talk About Automating ItHow the numbers are worked out
A manual process costs you the time it consumes multiplied by what you pay the person consuming it. Most business owners feel that a task is a drag but have never put a number on it, because the cost arrives a few minutes at a time rather than as a bill. This calculator does that arithmetic: enter how often the task happens, how long one round of it takes, and roughly what the person doing it is paid, and it returns the hours and the money it takes out of your business each year. It asks for nothing in return and the result appears immediately.
The hours and the cost are pure arithmetic on what you entered. Frequency multiplied by minutes gives the annual hours; hours multiplied by your rate gives the money. Daily means 260 working days, weekly means 52, monthly means 12. No benchmark, average or assumption of ours is mixed into that figure, which is why we are comfortable putting it in front of you without qualification.
The saving range is the one estimate on the page, and it is shown as a range on purpose. The upper end is anchored to published research rather than to our own optimism. Ardent Partners surveyed 212 accounts payable and finance leaders for Accounts Payable Metrics that Matter in 2025 and reported a cost per invoice of $2.78 at organisations with high automation, against $12.88 at those without: a gap of roughly 78 per cent. Two honest caveats travel with that number. It compares different organisations rather than measuring one before and after, and it describes finance teams large enough to have an accounts payable function, which a business processing forty invoices a week does not. Treat it as the ceiling and plan on the lower end.
The build budget is a sanity check, not a quote. It converts the first year of the conservative saving into hours of development at our rate of $150 an hour. If the answer is a handful of hours, the process is not worth automating and we would rather you found that out here than after a call.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is plain arithmetic on the three numbers you enter, with nothing added. How often the task happens in a year, multiplied by how many minutes one round takes, gives the hours. Those hours multiplied by the hourly cost of the person doing it gives the money. We use 260 working days for anything you enter as daily, 52 weeks for weekly and 12 for monthly. No industry averages are mixed into your figure, so the number is yours rather than a benchmark dressed up as a prediction.
Use the loaded cost of the person doing the work, not their advertised salary. That means their pay plus on-costs such as superannuation, payroll tax, leave and the share of overhead they carry. As a rough guide the loaded cost is commonly a quarter to a third above base pay. If you are unsure, entering base pay gives you a conservative number, which is the right direction to be wrong in.
It is presented as a range, from half to about four fifths of the current cost, and it is deliberately a range rather than one confident figure. The upper end is anchored to published data rather than invented: Ardent Partners surveyed 212 accounts payable and finance leaders in 2025 and found organisations with high automation reported a cost per invoice of $2.78 against $12.88 for those without, a gap of roughly 78 per cent. That is a comparison between organisations, not a measured before-and-after of one company automating, so we show it as the optimistic end and suggest planning on the lower one.
Because you would be entitled to assume the number was the bait rather than the point. The whole calculation runs in your browser and the result appears without you telling us anything at all. There is no form behind it and no address to give.
The reliable test is whether the task follows rules you could write down. Copying data between two systems, chasing a document, producing the same report each week, checking one list against another, sending a templated message: all rules-based and all automatable. Work that needs judgement about an unusual case, a relationship, or a decision with no clear rule is not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Most real processes are a mix, which is why the saving is a range rather than everything.
It is the number of hours of development work that year one of the saving alone would pay for, at our rate of $150 an hour. It is not a quote, because we have not seen your systems. It is a sanity check: if a process only justifies three hours of build, automating it is probably not worth either of our time, and we would rather you knew that before booking a call.
No. Nothing you type leaves your browser. The arithmetic happens on your own device and no part of it is sent to us or to anyone else, so there is nothing for us to keep. If that changes we will say so here first.
It is usually right and it usually looks wrong, because the cost arrives in four-minute pieces and never as an invoice. Check the frequency first, as that is the input people misjudge most often. If the task genuinely happens forty times a week and genuinely takes four minutes, then it genuinely consumes about 138 hours a year, and that is the point of doing the sum.
Now you have the number
If it is large enough to be worth fixing, the next step is a short conversation about which parts of it are actually rules-based. If it is not, we will say so.
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