What is the busywork costing your business, and can you trust the number?

Start with one recurring task

Pick one task your team does over and over, such as quote preparation, document intake, or weekly reporting. Use a process your team knows well. Reasonable estimates are enough to begin.

Write down five figures:

1. How many times a week the task happens.
2. How many minutes one person spends on one occurrence.
3. What one hour of that employee's time costs.
4. How many people each spend that many minutes on every occurrence.
5. How many weeks a year the work happens.

The usual starting point for weeks is 50 working weeks per year. We start with 50 weeks to allow for time off. Change this to match how often the work happens in your business.

If the hourly figure already includes pay, employer taxes, benefits, and overhead, enter it as a fully loaded cost and no extra multiplier is added. The 1.3 employer cost multiplier is not applied while fully loaded cost is selected. If the figure is a base hourly wage, the starting assumption is the 1.3 employer cost multiplier. Change it if your loaded cost is different.

Write down where each figure came from

Look at the work before you average it from memory.

1. Name the task.
2. Pull a small set of recent occurrences. One recent week of that task is enough to start.
3. For each occurrence, note who spent time on it and about how many minutes each of those people spent.
4. Next to every figure, write where it came from. A count from a sent folder, three timed intakes, or the payroll rate for that role is enough.
5. Mark anything you estimated, and mark any default you did not change.

A figure you typed is your estimate. An editable default, such as 50 working weeks per year or the 1.3 employer cost multiplier, is a starting assumption that you can change to match your business. Everything else is calculated arithmetic from the figures shown.

Count each person's time once

Person-time means the hours people actually spend, added together. It is not a headcount, and it is not the minutes split across a team and then multiplied by the team again.

Weekly manual effort, in person-hours:

times per week × minutes each person spends on one occurrence ÷ 60 × people who each spend that time on every occurrence.

In the calculator, that last number is the field People doing this work. Enter how many people each spend the full minutes on every occurrence. The weekly total already multiplies by that number, so do not multiply those hours a second time.

Use three participants on an occurrence only when each of them spends the minutes you wrote down on that same occurrence. A quote that one person receives, a second person checks, and a third person enters, for 30 minutes each, is three participants.

Do not count three participants when three people divide one queue. If the week's occurrences are already the whole queue, and each occurrence takes those minutes from only the person who handles it, the participant count for that occurrence is 1. The other people are doing other occurrences in the same queue. They are already inside the weekly count. Multiplying that total by the headcount counts the same work twice.

Here is that difference with the same weekly count and the same minutes. Forty occurrences a week, at 30 minutes each, are divided across the team so only one person handles each occurrence:

40 × 30 × 1 ÷ 60 = 20 person-hours each week.

Those 20 person-hours are the time for a divided queue. They are not the worked example. The worked example is the case where all three people spend 30 minutes on every occurrence.

Read the result for what it is

Annual work cost is weekly person-hours × hourly cost × working weeks. Read that figure as four different things.

• Current work cost. This is what the labor costs now, from the volume, time, and payroll figures you entered.
• Recoverable labor capacity. These are hours that might be freed if some repetitive steps no longer need a person. Capacity is time the team could use on other work. It is not money returned.
• Cash savings. This is money you stop spending. It happens only when you can name a cost that actually stops, such as paid hours you reduce or a hire you do not make. This note does not calculate cash savings.
• Ongoing human review and exception effort. Someone still reviews the output, handles exceptions, and finishes the steps people still do. Count that remaining effort before treating any of 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.

The results compare current work cost with a managed automation fee. For a standard engagement focused on repetitive manual work, we look for identified annual work costs of three to six times the annual fee. That gives us an opportunity to investigate. The diagnostic still has to establish what can be automated and whether the investment is worthwhile. Passing this initial screen does not establish that all of that cost can be eliminated.

A worked example with made-up figures

Illustrative example (hypothetical, not a client result).

These figures are made up so the arithmetic is easy to follow. They are not a measured result.

Imagine quote intake. Each intake is one occurrence. It happens 40 times a week. Three people each spend 30 minutes on every intake: one person receives it, one person checks it, and one person enters it. The work runs 50 weeks a year. The employee cost is $55 per hour and already includes pay, employer taxes, benefits, and overhead. It is entered as a fully loaded cost, so the 1.3 employer cost multiplier is not applied.

Weekly person-hours:

40 occurrences/week × 30 minutes per participant × 3 participants/occurrence ÷ 60 = 60 person-hours/week.

Estimated annual work cost:

60 × $55 × 50 = $165,000 per year.

Per month:

$165,000 ÷ 12 = $13,750 per month.

Against the $60,000 standard annual fee:

$165,000 ÷ $60,000 = 2.75 × the $60,000 standard annual fee.

On the screen above, that result reads: Worth reviewing the scope. The current estimate is below the usual three-times screen. We would need to examine the scope and recoverable value before recommending a standard engagement.

The $165,000 is current work cost on these made-up inputs. It is not a count of hours the team gets back. It is not cash savings. Review, exceptions, and the steps people still do are not subtracted.

This illustration counts three people on every intake. It does not use the divided-queue figure of 20 person-hours.

What happens next

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 call comes first. The paid diagnostic is a separate decision.

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.

During discovery and the diagnostic, we review the inputs together. The baseline you confirm becomes the reference for the proposal and later value reporting.

The calculator multiplies the estimates you enter. The worked example above uses made-up figures to show the arithmetic. Neither the calculator nor the example promises savings or a return on investment.