The cost of manual work

How many hours are your spreadsheets, inboxes and paper quietly eating?

Tell us roughly how your work runs today. We'll estimate the hours lost each month - split into where they actually go. Then we get them back.

Your processes today
Processes tracked in Excel
status, lists, logs kept in spreadsheets
Processes run over email
tasks, approvals, handoffs sent by mail
Processes still on paper
forms, sign-offs, printed documents
Employees involved in these
people who touch the processes above
Estimated time lost - every month
You are effectively paying for
-
full-time people doing manual work
- hours / month · ≈ - hours / year
Front-linefilling out forms & re-keying data
- h/mo
Managementhunting for status, no live reporting
- h/mo
Errors & blamefinding what went wrong, no audit trail
- h/mo

These figures use illustrative per-process rates to show the shape of the loss, not a quote. We calibrate them to your real numbers in the free workshop.

How is this calculated? ↓

The method

Where these numbers come from

Round numbers are easy to dismiss, so we don't use any. Every hour above is built from three things: how long a manual task actually takes, how often it happens, and how many people it touches. Here is the whole chain, with nothing hidden.

1 · Front-line time

employees × manual processes × ~8 instances/mo × minutes per instance

The hours your team spends doing the manual steps. We cost one run of a process by its medium:

  • Paper, 8 min: locate & retrieve 2.5, re-key into a system 2.5, route or scan 1.5, file 1.5
  • Excel, 6 min: find the sheet/row 1.5, update & reconcile versions 2.5, copy across systems 2
  • Email, 5 min: find the latest in the thread 1.5, copy or re-key 2, forward & chase 1.5

Frequency is a team-average 8 runs of each process per employee per month - deliberately low, because people specialize and most never touch a given process.

2 · Management time

processes × 4 h + employees × 0.5 h, per month

The oversight a manual process needs because nothing reports itself:

  • Status-chasing, ~0.8 h: the "where is this?" questions across a month
  • Reporting, ~2.5 h: updates compiled by hand, with no live dashboard
  • Coordination, ~0.7 h: handling the exceptions and the handoffs

Plus ~0.5 h per employee per month of supervising work the manual way.

3 · Errors & rework

instances × error rate × time to find and fix × handoffs

Rare per item, but expensive to chase down with no audit trail:

  • Volume: ~80 runs per process per month
  • Error rate: 1.2% Excel, 1.0% email, 2.0% paper (the low end of the measured 1-5%)
  • Fix time: ~0.9 h to find and correct each one

Rising 3% per employee - every extra handoff is another place a mistake can hide.

Calibrated conservatively. These defaults land near a tenth of a team's time, not a third. In the free Proof of Concept we replace these averages with your real volumes and times - and the estimate becomes a measurement.

Grounded in published research: knowledge workers lose ~1.8 h/day (McKinsey) to ~2.5 h/day (IDC) searching for and gathering information; manual data-entry error rates run about 1-5%. We sit at the low end of both.

Turn this into a free PoC →