Cost of inaction calculator
Quantify what manual operations are costing your business every month. In under 90 seconds.
Pre-populated with sector defaults. Adjust to your numbers.
Sets revenue per employee (£80,000), a default hourly cost and a typical enquiry value. Indicative figures, pending verification.
Most owner-run SMEs sit between 50 and 80%.
How is work tracked today? Select all that apply.
Monthly cost of inaction
/month
Severe: £9,277/month, 16% of payroll
That is £111,324 a year on work that could largely be automated. Addressed properly it releases 75 hrs a month, roughly 0.5 full-time equivalent, and around £86,395 a year in value released.
£5,086 of the £9,277 is realistically recoverable (55%), using a separate recovery rate for each cost type rather than one blanket assumption.
We record anonymised results to publish UK SME benchmarks.
Key-person exposure (risk-adjusted)
£48,000/year
60% of decisions and knowledge sit with key people, across a team of value £80,000 per head, at a 10% assumed annualised likelihood of key-person disruption (illness, departure, extended absence). That likelihood is a judgement-based assumption, adjustable in advanced settings.
Structuring and documenting knowledge halves the exposure, it does not remove the person. This sits outside your monthly figure because it is a risk, not a cost you are paying today.
Monthly cost breakdown
Where the cost sits, line by line
Key-person exposure is reported separately, because it is a risk you carry rather than a cost you pay every month.
Not everything automates equally, so each cost type carries its own recovery rate.
Weighted by your task mix: data entry 85%, reports 80%, chasing 70%, searching 60%.
Automatic acknowledgement and routing removes most of the damage-control time.
Faster response recovers some lost conversion, never all of it.
The order matters. This is your sequence based on where the recoverable value actually sits.
Connect the systems that currently talk through a human. System-to-system sync removes the re-keying entirely.
Automatic acknowledgement, routing and status updates. Chasing stops being a job.
Automate compilation from source data. The report writes itself; you review it.
A structured, searchable knowledge base. Ask the system, not the person.
Annual value released
£86,395/year
Cost recovered
£23,733
Capacity redeployed
£9,273
Revenue protected
£29,390
Risk exposure reduced
£24,000
Capacity released
75 hrs/month
0.5 FTE
Each released hour is counted once: either as cost you stop paying for, or as time redeployed into productive work. Never both. Redeployed hours are valued at £41 per hour of output for your sector. Estimated remaining cost after automation is £4,191 per month.
Every formula and every assumption, stated plainly.
These figures are estimates built from the numbers you entered and the assumptions above. Nothing here is presented as sourced unless a source is named, and sector figures marked [VERIFY] are placeholders pending checking against the ONS Annual Business Survey.
Turn that cost into capacity
The next step is deciding what it would take to build the first fix. Start with the Process Discovery Wizard, or talk it through with us.