One task dominates the total
That is where to look first, and it is frequently not the task anyone complains about. The loud problem and the expensive problem are rarely the same problem.
TMI / TOOLS
WHAT THE REPEAT WORK
COSTS A YEAR.
The hours nobody counts because they are spread across everybody. Enter the tasks you already know about and the page turns them into a yearly figure. Nothing is sent anywhere — the numbers stay in this browser.
THE CALCULATOR
YOUR NUMBERS,
MULTIPLIED.
—HOURS A YEAR
—A YEAR
—FULL-TIME ROLES
—MOST EXPENSIVE TASK
Put a figure in and the total appears here.
Calculated in your browser. Nothing on this page is sent to TMI.
HOW IT WORKS
SHOWING
ITS WORKING.
Every figure above comes from the numbers you typed. There is no benchmark behind it, no model, and no data from anyone else's company.
- 01
The arithmetic
Hours a week multiplied by the number of people doing it, multiplied by fifty-two, gives hours a year. Multiplied by the hourly cost you entered, it gives the yearly cost. The full-time figure divides the hours by 2,080, which is forty hours across fifty-two weeks — a convention, not a claim about your company. - 02
Use loaded cost, not wage
The hourly figure that makes this honest includes employment costs rather than just the wage. If you do not have it to hand, the hours column is still the useful one, and it is the column that usually changes the conversation. - 03
What it does not do
It does not say what can be automated, what it would cost to automate, or what you would get back. Plenty of the work on most of these lists should not be automated at all — some of it should simply stop.
WHAT TO DO WITH IT
THE NUMBER IS NOT
THE POINT.
The total is more than a full-time role
Worth saying out loud in a management meeting, because it is usually invisible precisely by being spread across eight people's weeks rather than concentrated in one job.
The work is copying between two systems
That is an integration question before it is an automation question, and it is usually the cheaper of the two to fix.
You could not estimate the hours
Then the first piece of work is measurement, not automation. Nobody should buy a system to fix a quantity they cannot state.
Any of these is a reasonable thing to act on without hiring anybody. Where they lead somewhere bigger, that is what the $5,000 audit is for →
COMMON QUESTIONS
ABOUT THIS
CALCULATOR.
Is anything I type here sent to TMI?
No. It is calculated in your browser and nothing leaves the page.
Why does it not show me the ROI of automating this?
Because that needs the cost of building it, and TMI will not quote a build before doing the audit. A return on investment figure produced without knowing the investment is a marketing number, and the site does not carry those.
Where does 2,080 hours come from?
Forty hours a week across fifty-two weeks. It is the standard convention for a full-time year and it is used here only to make a large number of hours easier to picture. It is not a statement about how your company staffs.
Most of our repeat work is not on a computer.
Then this tool will undercount it, and the audit is the better instrument. Walking paperwork between two buildings is as real a cost as re-keying it, and considerably harder to see from a spreadsheet.
YOU HAVE THE NUMBER