Pick a single manual process the team does every week. Five questions, then the annual cost of doing it the manual way, the annual savings if you automate it, and the payback period in months. Honest numbers, no inflation.
A focused automation built to fixed quote, scoped to your actual process. You own the code, it integrates with the systems you already use.
This is a 60-second estimate based on the inputs above. Real automation builds are scoped over a 20-minute conversation, free, with a fixed quote before any work starts.
People time is hours per week × 48 working weeks per year × the fully-loaded hourly rate. This is the recurring cost of doing the task the manual way, year after year.
Error cost is error frequency per month × 12 × 2 hours of senior time at £60/hr fully-loaded. Two hours is conservative: real-world post-mortems on data and reporting errors typically run three to six hours of senior time per material error.
Downstream value applies a task multiplier to the time component. Data entry scores 1.0x because most of the cost is the time itself. Customer communications and judgement work score higher because errors and delays leak revenue or trigger client unhappiness.
Annual savings is the share of total annual cost the automation removes. Larger builds capture more (a focused build removes about 70%, a larger build 85%) because they handle the long tail of edge cases that smaller builds leave to humans. Payback is build cost / monthly savings.
See related guides on automating data entry and automating expense reports.
