The automation gap

What is repetitive work actually costing you?

Most businesses know they do manual, repetitive work. Few have put a number on it. This calculator shows the annual cost of the tasks your team repeats every week — before any automation or process change.

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Follow the thread to see where the work starts, what changes, and how the evidence becomes useful.

How service improves, in four stages:

01 Notice02 Connect03 Change04 Prove
Number of people
12
Hourly cost per person
£35

Salary, NI, pension and overheads. £25–£45 covers most service roles.

Chasing requests, emails and follow-ups
~3h
Copying data between systems by hand
~2.5h
Manual reporting and data exports
~2h
Booking and scheduling manually
~1.5h
Re-entering the same information twice
~2h
Chasing internal sign-offs and approvals
~1h
Manual invoicing, billing or statements
~1.5h
Hunting for information across tools
~1h
Estimated annual cost of repetitive work
£110,880
Hours per week
66
Hours per year
3,168
Working days
422

Equivalent to 1.8 full-time people spending their entire year doing nothing but repeating themselves.

How this compares McKinsey Global Institute
Your team
5.5h/person
Benchmark
~7.5h/person

Your team is 2.0 hours below the published benchmark — the average knowledge worker spends ~7.5 hours per week on tasks that could be automated.

A 10% reduction in repetitive work would save £11,088 a year
Let's talk about where to start →

The cost of not changing is already on the payroll.

This gives you a number to take into a conversation. The real picture comes from understanding which processes create the most pressure and where to start. That is what the Operational Assessment surfaces.

40% of time in operational teams is spent on tasks that could be reduced or automated.
3× more likely to retain staff when repetitive low-value work is reduced.
94% of workers perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks in their role. Zapier, 2021
Read the thinking behind this number: Lost Time As Service Evidence ↗
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