How much is manual admin really costing you?

Repetitive admin is easy to ignore because it never shows up as a bill. Nobody invoices you for the two hours spent building a report or the afternoon spent copying data between systems. But you’re paying for it, in wages, in delays and in work that doesn’t get done.

Here’s how to work out what one task is really costing you.

The basic sum

You need four numbers:

1. Hours per week each person spends on the task
2. How many people do it
3. What an hour of their time costs your business
4. Weeks per year the task happens (we use 48 to allow for holidays)

Multiply them together:

hours per week × people × cost per hour × weeks per year = cost per year

A worked example

Say two people in your office each spend five hours a week building reports by hand. Their time costs you about $45 an hour.

• 5 hours × 2 people = 10 hours a week
• 10 hours × 48 weeks = 480 hours a year
• 480 hours × $45 = $21,600 a year

That’s one task. Most businesses have several like it.

Working out the cost of an hour

The cost of an hour isn’t just someone’s hourly pay. Superannuation, leave, equipment and overheads all add to it. If you’re not sure, these are reasonable starting points:

• Admin staff: about $45 an hour
• Tradespeople and technicians: about $80 an hour
• Owners and professionals: $120 an hour or more

If the person doing the task is someone you’d normally bill out to clients, use their charge-out rate instead. Every hour they spend on admin is an hour you can’t bill.

The costs people forget

The yearly figure is just the starting point. A few things rarely make it into the sum:

• Mistakes. A wrong figure on an invoice or a missed field on a form costs time to fix, and sometimes money or a client’s trust.
• Delays. Quotes that go out a day late lose jobs. Invoices that go out at the end of the month slow down your cash flow.
• The work that doesn’t get done. If your best people are stuck on paperwork, they’re not winning new work, looking after clients or growing the business.
• Staff turnover. Nobody enjoys repetitive copy-and-paste. It’s one of the quickest ways to burn out good people.

What automating it is worth

Automation rarely removes a task completely. More often it cuts the time by 80 to 90 percent, with a person checking the result. In the example above, that’s still around 400 hours and $18,000 a year back.

Because you pay once for the software and own it for life, the savings keep coming every year after it has paid for itself. Most of the builds we do pay for themselves within a few months.

Try it with your own numbers

Our time-saved calculator does the sums for you, week by week, month by month and year by year, including the cost of a care plan. It also gives you a rough idea of what a build would cost and how quickly it would pay for itself.

If the number surprises you, book a free call. We’ll walk through the task with you and tell you honestly whether it’s worth automating.