Operations5 min read
The real cost of doing it by hand
Manual work rarely shows up as a bill, so it rarely gets counted. Here is how to price the hours you are already spending.
Published
Software has an invoice. Doing it yourself does not. That asymmetry is why businesses keep paying for the more expensive option — one cost is visible and the other is absorbed into evenings.
Put a number on it
Take one recurring task. Copying bookings into a calendar, chasing an invoice, retyping numbers into a spreadsheet. Time it honestly for one week, multiply by fifty, and multiply that by what an hour of your time is worth. The number is usually larger than the tool you refused to buy.
- Twenty minutes a day is roughly two full working weeks a year.
- That is before the cost of the mistakes manual entry produces.
- And before the cost of the work you did not do because you were doing this.
Where the argument stops
This is not an argument for automating everything. Some tasks are the job. A quick phone call to a customer is not inefficiency to be eliminated — it is often the reason they stay. Automating the parts of the work that are the relationship is how businesses become interchangeable.
Automate what nobody would miss. Keep what people would.
The test we use: if a customer could tell it had been automated and would be disappointed, do not automate it. If they could not tell, or would be relieved, it is a candidate.
