The Cost of Doing Nothing Calculator

Manual admin has no invoice. It still has a price. Work it out here.

Repetitive manual work never arrives as a bill, so it never gets scrutinised like one. This calculator turns the hours your team spends on rekeying, chasing, copying and reconciling into a Rand figure you can actually weigh against the cost of fixing it.

Estimate honestly: think of a normal week, not a good one

Use the fully loaded hourly cost, not just salary

Start with the Realistic scenario

Compare the result against what a fix would cost

Your Numbers

People doing repetitive adminAnyone who rekeys, copies between systems, or chases by hand

Hours per person, per weekOn manual, repetitive tasks a system could handle

Average hourly costFully loaded: salary plus benefits, tax and overheads

What It Costs You

Based on 46 working weeks per year.

Hours lost per year

690 hours

Cost per year

R 172 500

Cost over three years

R 517 500

The part nobody budgets for

This figure excludes the errors, the delayed invoices, the slow quotes and the opportunities missed while your best people do work a system should be doing.

What You Could Recover

Automation rarely removes manual work entirely. Pick a scenario for how much of that time a well-designed fix could realistically hand back.

Hours back per year

241 hours

Value recovered per year

R 60 375

Now compare that to the price of fixing it. A single well-built workflow typically costs R5,000 to R25,000 once off. If your recoverable value above is a multiple of that, the manual way is the expensive way.

Where the Hours Usually Hide

Retyping the same information into more than one system
Copying figures between spreadsheets, emails and accounting software
Chasing quotes, approvals or payments by hand
Assembling the same report manually every week or month
Answering the same customer questions one at a time
Fixing errors caused by all of the above

The calculation assumes 46 productive weeks per year and uses your fully loaded hourly cost. It is a decision-making estimate, not a financial projection. The point is not the exact number; it is whether that number deserves a line on your agenda.