What is the busywork costing your business, and can you trust the number?
Small tasks that repeat every week rarely show up as their own line item. This note follows one familiar task through the weekly total and the yearly cost, so you can run the same steps on a task of your own.
A week of client updates.
Illustrative example (hypothetical, not a client result).
Imagine a client-service team of five. Each person prepares 20 client updates a week. Each update takes 30 minutes of that person's time to gather the latest information from emails and records, check what has happened, and write the message. One person handles each update from start to finish.
Per person, 20 updates times 30 minutes is 600 minutes, or 10 hours a week. Five people at 10 hours each comes to 50 hours a week, across 100 updates.
Put a cost on those hours
For this illustration, price the hour at $55 and treat that figure as a fully loaded cost. Pay, employer taxes, benefits, and overhead are already in it. The $55 and the 50 working weeks are illustrative assumptions. They are not measured client results, a typical industry workload, a pay benchmark, or guaranteed savings. Fifty weeks is also the calculator's usual starting point, which leaves room for time off. Change the weeks when your calendar differs.
50 hours a week times $55 times 50 weeks = $137,500 a year.
That $137,500 is current work cost on these made-up inputs: what the labor costs now.
Try the same numbers in the calculator
Open the manual work cost calculator, add one workflow, and enter these figures:
- Workflow name: Preparing client updates
- Times per week: 20
- Minutes each time: 30
- Employee cost per hour: 55
- Cost mode: Fully loaded cost
- People doing this work: 5
- Working weeks per year: 50
Use 20 for Times per week because that is how often each person prepares an update. Keep the team total of 100 out of that field. With People doing this work set to 5, entering 100 would count every update five times.
Weekly hours are times per week times minutes each time divided by 60 times people doing this work. On these entries that is 20 times 30 divided by 60 times 5, which is 50 hours a week. Fully loaded cost is selected, so the 1.3 employer cost multiplier is not applied. Annual work cost is those weekly hours times the hourly cost times working weeks, the $137,500 above.
When people differ in volume, minutes, or hourly cost, give each person or group its own workflow row.
What the number is, and what you do next
Current work cost is the size of the labor in front of you. What you might do with that time, and any cash you might stop spending, are separate questions.
Recoverable labor capacity is time the team might spend on other work if some repetitive steps no longer need a person. That capacity is time, not money returned.
Cash savings are dollars you stop spending, and only when you can name the cost that stops, such as paid hours you reduce or a hire you do not make. This note does not calculate cash savings.
Someone still reviews the update before it goes to the client, handles exceptions, and finishes the steps people still do. Count that remaining effort before treating the current hours as work the team no longer does.
The result uses your estimates and the editable assumptions shown. It is a starting point for understanding current work costs. It does not account for every implementation constraint or predict the savings an automation will achieve.
To price a task of your own, use a process your team knows well. Reasonable estimates are enough to begin. Every input is yours; we only do the multiplication. If the hourly figure is a base wage, select Hourly wage. The starting assumption is then the 1.3 employer cost multiplier. Change it when your loaded cost is different.
Bring your estimates to a discovery call. We'll look at the process, what could change, and whether a paid diagnostic is the right next step.
The discovery call is the presale conversation about your process and whether an engagement could make sense. The diagnostic is a separate paid step that produces the written report. You decide whether to proceed with it after the call.
Book a discovery call.
Start with the process you want to improve.
The calculator multiplies the estimates you enter. The example above uses made-up figures to show the arithmetic. Neither the calculator nor the example promises savings or a return on investment.