The back-of-envelope, done properly
What does your office actually cost?
Five honest guesses about your operation. The arithmetic is shown — 250 working days, 48 working weeks — so you can check it, argue with it, or redo it on the back of an actual envelope.
Your office, roughly
Emails, PDFs, phone orders someone retypes into the system
Find the account, match the products, enter it, file the email
The ring-round, the reminder emails, the statements
Quotes, delivery queries, supplier documents, the Monday numbers
A £26k salary costs roughly £15–16/hour with NI, pension and overheads
What that costs, per year
Total
£16,480 /year
That’s 23 hours a week of moving information by hand — 67% of a full-time person.
These are your estimates. A free walk-through replaces them with measured numbers — and a ranked plan for getting the hours back.
What the number does and doesn’t say
It says what the information-moving work costs at your wage rates. It doesn’t say all of it can or should be automated — some of those hours are judgment wearing admin’s clothes, and those stay human. Finding which is which is exactly what a walk-through is for: we spend a day on your floor, map where the hours actually go, and hand you a plan with each fix priced against the number it removes. The visit and the plan are free, and the plan is yours either way.
The thinking behind the arithmetic is in the field notes: what retyping really costs, the hire-or-fix decision and what fixing it costs.