Calculator

What is manual reporting actually costing you?

Most teams have never added it up. Move the three sliders to your own situation and the figures update as you go — the arithmetic is shown underneath, so you can check it.

Pulling exports, copy-pasting, formatting, checking the totals.

3 hours

Count anyone who touches the report before it's finished.

1 person

Roughly salary plus employer costs, divided by hours worked. £25 is a reasonable default for an administrator or junior manager.

£25 / hour
Assumption: 46 working weeks a year, and a working day of 7.5 hours. I've used 46 rather than 52 to allow for holiday and bank holidays, so the result is deliberately conservative.
Cost of doing it by hand
£3,450
a year, in staff time alone — before counting the errors, the delays, or the cost of the numbers being wrong.
18.4
working days a year given back
138
hours a year currently spent
The sum: 3 hours a week × 46 weeks × the hourly cost. Days are those hours divided by 7.5.
Reading the number properly

What this figure is, and what it isn't.

A calculator that only ever flatters the pitch isn't worth much. Here's how to treat the result.

It's a cost, not a cheque

Automating the report frees the time; it doesn't post the money back into your bank account. The gain is real, but it shows up as capacity — that person doing something more useful — rather than as a refund.

Automation is rarely 100%

Most reporting keeps a few minutes of human judgement: a sense-check, a comment on the exceptions. Assume you recover most of the time, not all of it.

The error cost isn't in here

This only counts time. It doesn't price a decision made on a wrong number, a month-end restated, or a customer invoiced incorrectly — often the bigger cost, and the harder one to estimate.

There's a build cost too

Setting the automation up is a one-off fixed price. Compare that against the annual figure above rather than treating the saving as free.

Some reports shouldn't be automated

If a report runs twice a year and takes an hour, leave it alone. Automation earns its keep on frequency and repetition, and I'll tell you when it doesn't.

Your hourly cost may be higher

If the person rebuilding the report is a manager or a finance lead rather than an administrator, push the rate slider up. That's often where the real number hides.

If the number surprised you

The next step is small and free.

Send me one report you rebuild by hand. I'll come back with what it would look like automated, what it would cost to build, and whether it's worth doing at all.

Book a free data review See example reports

What I'd want to see

  • The report itself, or a screenshot of it
  • Roughly where the data comes from
  • How often it's produced, and by whom
  • What decision it's used for

You don't need to send real customer data for a first look — a redacted copy or a screenshot is plenty. Anything you do send is treated as confidential.