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What is a manual process costing you?

Three numbers, one answer: how many hours a month a repeated manual process consumes and the annual dollars tied up in it. Useful for baselining before an Agent Reliability Review or an Implementation Sprint. Formula visible below. No email gate.

How many times the process runs. Applications processed, invoices sent, leads triaged, tickets closed — whatever the unit is.

/month

The realistic median across a normal day, including the parts nobody logs — reading the email, opening the tab, waiting for the page to load, double-checking the field.

min

Salary + benefits + overhead ÷ 2,000. A $75k role usually loads to $55–$65/hr; a $150k role to $110–$130/hr.

$/hr

How the calculation works

Plain arithmetic. No hidden multipliers. If the number looks bigger than expected, it usually is — most owner-led firms underestimate the true cost of a repeated process by 30 to 50% because the transitional time (opening the tab, reading the email, deciding what to do) is never in the estimate.

hours_per_month  = (volume_per_month × minutes_per_instance) ÷ 60
cost_per_month   = hours_per_month × hourly_rate
annual_cost      = cost_per_month × 12

Next step: if the annual cost is comfortably above the sprint fee, run the numbers onthe ROI calculator to see how quickly automation would pay back. If it is not, this is probably not the workflow to automate first.

Last reviewed: 2026-08-13.