What is automating this workflow actually worth?
Most ROI calculators multiply your headcount by a productivity percentage someone made up, then hand you a seven-figure number for a slide. We built this one the way we cost real builds: one workflow, measured hours, stated assumptions, a range instead of a fake-precise figure. It will tell you not to automate when the numbers are thin.
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The team that touches it today, not the whole company.
Team total right now: 30 hours a week.
Salary plus benefits and overhead. A $90k salary is roughly $55 to $60 loaded.
Document handling, data entry, lookups, drafting from templates, status chasing. Judgment calls do not count.
Time spent on mistakes and on work that came back wrong.
Model usage plus hosting. One workflow at this scale typically lands between $100 and $500 a month.
Captured hours plus reduced rework, valued at your loaded rate.
Costs counted: $10,000 build, $800 of your team's time during the build, $3,000 a year to run.
Even on the conservative end, this workflow pays for its own build inside six months. The numbers say automate it now and measure against signed acceptance criteria.
- 015 people × 6 hours = 30 team hours a week on this workflow.
- 0230 hours × 46 working weeks = 1,380 hours a year. We use 46 weeks, not 52, because people take leave.
- 0350% of that is structured work: 690 hours a year a system could take on.
- 04A first build captures 50% to 75% of the structured share in year one: 345 to 518 hours back. Nobody captures 100%. Review time remains.
- 05At $65/hour loaded cost, that is $22,500 to $33,500 in labor value.
- 06Rework: 3 hours a week × 46 weeks = 138 hours. Validation built into the workflow removes 40% to 70% of it: $3,600 to $6,300.
- 07Year-one cost: $10,000 fixed-price build + $800 of your team's time (12 hours for acceptance criteria and reviews) + $3,000 to run it = $14,000.
- 08Year-one net: $12,000 to $26,000.
Deliberately flat. We do not escalate benefits 10% a year the way most calculators do. If your volume grows, rerun the numbers with the new volume.
This workflow costs roughly $98,500 a year in labor and rework at your inputs. That recurs every year, and it grows with volume.
One more person at your loaded rate is about $135,000 a year. More throughput at the same error rate, and the cost scales linearly with volume.
$14,000 in year one, all costs counted. Returns 8 to 11 team hours a week, and the cost stays flat as volume grows.
- ·46 working weeks a year. People take vacation and get sick. Calculators that use 52 weeks overstate by about 12% before they do anything else.
- ·Year-one capture of 50% to 75% of the structured share. These are working numbers from our own builds, not an industry benchmark. The exact figure depends on how messy the inputs are, which is why we show a range.
- ·Rework reduction of 40% to 70%, and only where validation is part of the build. If the build just moves data faster, it moves bad data faster too.
- ·Build cost of $10,000 because that is what we charge for the first workflow: two weeks, in your environment, paid only after the acceptance criteria you signed pass. Your own time during the build is counted too, at your loaded rate.
- ·Excluded on purpose: revenue multipliers, productivity uplift percentages, morale effects. They may be real, but if a benefit cannot be tied to hours or error cost, we leave it out of the math.
We email the numbers and the inputs that produced them. Nothing else, no sequence.
The first build is this exact math, with your real numbers.
We scope one workflow with you and write acceptance criteria you sign before work starts. We build it in your environment in two weeks. You pay $10,000 only after every criterion passes. Nothing upfront. If the verdict above said the numbers are thin, tell us anyway. We will say so too, and point you at a workflow where they are not.
200+ production deployments since 2014, for clients including Bayer, Takeda, Adidas and Rockwell Automation. Built to SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR standards. EU AI Act-aligned delivery.
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