What does manual work cost your business?
Calculate your ROI from process automation in 60 seconds. See exactly how much time and money you lose to repetitive manual tasks.
Your situation
Wasted hours/week
80u
Annual manual cost
€166,400
Potential annual saving
€118,227
ROI after 12 months
3908%
Payback period
Under 1 month
Based on a starting package of €2,950 and 70% reduction of manual work.
How this calculation works
Automation typically reduces manual work by 60-80%. We use a conservative 70%.
Error costs are estimated at 30% of error-related work time (rework, corrections, customer contact).
The payback calculation is based on a Datacaps starter package of €2,950.
ROI is the net benefit (savings minus investment) divided by the investment, after 12 months.
These are indicative estimates. During a no-obligation intake call we calculate the exact potential for your specific situation.
How this calculator arrives at its number
Most ROI calculators are a black box that always lands on an impressive figure. This one runs on four inputs and two assumptions, and you should be able to check both. Here is the whole calculation.
- Hours lost. Employees multiplied by the hours each one spends on manual work per week, multiplied by 52 weeks and by your internal hourly cost. That is the direct bill.
- Cost of errors. Your error percentage applied to that amount, then taken at 30 percent. Not every mistake costs the full hour it took to make, so the calculator deliberately counts it at less than face value.
- Assumption one: 70 percent. The calculator assumes automation removes seven tenths of that loss, not all of it. Exceptions, checks and the human judgement you want to keep are the remaining three tenths.
- Assumption two: a starter project. The payback is calculated against a fixed implementation cost, the price of a first, contained project. A broader roll-out costs more and pays back later.
Where this number is wrong
In two directions. It is too optimistic when the manual work is genuinely varied, because seventy percent then turns out to be forty. It is too pessimistic when the hours you enter are only the ones you can see: the waiting, the chasing and the checking twice rarely make it into the estimate, and in practice they are often the larger half.
Treat the result as an order of magnitude, not a quote. It tells you whether the conversation is worth having. If it lands under a few thousand euro a year, it probably is not, and we would rather you knew that here than after a meeting.