What not automating costs you (do the math)

When I ask a business owner how much it costs them to enter orders by hand, the answer is almost always "nothing, Sofi does it". And it's true there's no invoice that says "order entry". But Sofi earns a salary, and if she spends six hours a week copying data from WhatsApp into a spreadsheet, those hours get paid all the same. You just don't see them.

That's why, before talking about tools, I always do the same math. It's simple, and it almost always surprises.

The math

Three numbers are enough: how many hours a week the task takes, how many people do it, and what an hour of their time is worth (salary plus overhead, divided by hours worked). Multiply, and scale it to a 46-week year, which is what's left after vacations and holidays.

Try it with one of your tasks:

What the math doesn't show

The number above is the floor, not the ceiling. Some costs don't fit in the multiplication and tend to be bigger:

• Mistakes. A wrongly entered order means a repeated shipment, an annoyed customer and sometimes a customer who doesn't come back.
• Delay. If an inquiry waits three hours because nobody got to it, that customer has probably bought somewhere else.
• What the person doesn't do. Six hours a week copying data are six hours not spent selling, serving better or thinking.

When automating pays off (and when it doesn't)

Not everything that repeats deserves a system. My rule looks at three things: the task happens at least once a week, it follows steps you can write down as a list, and its yearly cost is several times what automating it costs. If it ticks all three, it usually pays for itself in a few months.

If it doesn't, sometimes the best fix is a better spreadsheet or a reply template. Automating something that happens twice a year is spending money to feel modern.

Where to start

For one week, write down every task you repeat and how long it takes. At the end, sort the list by hours. The first one is your candidate. Run its numbers through the calculator and, if the result makes you uncomfortable, that's a good sign: there's money to recover.