ROI calculator

What one workflow costs you now, and what an agent could hand back.

Every figure below is yours except one. You supply the volume, the handling time, the hourly cost and the headcount. We supply the automation rate, it is an assumption rather than a study, and you can move it. The formula is printed on the page so you can check the result on paper.

No account, no email required to see the numbers. Nothing you type here is stored unless you ask us to send it to you.

Your numbers

These start on round placeholder figures so the page is readable. Nothing below means anything about your business until you replace them with yours.

Which workflow

Reading, checking and summarising documents

Your own count. A rough monthly average is fine.

Minutes an item, start to finish, across everyone who touches it.

$

Loaded means salary plus on-costs: super, leave, tools, the desk. Usually well above the base rate.

This does not change the total. It only shows how the returned hours would spread across the team.

The one assumption we supply

Illustrative example

How much of this workflow a supervised agent handles without a person. Ours, from deployments to date, not a published study. Move it if you think we are wrong: every number beside it moves too.

55% to 75% What we typically see: 55% to 75%

Currently sitting on what we typically see.

Exception rate: 8%

Documents the agent will not complete on its own: unusual formats, missing pages, anything it is not confident about. They still reach a person.

It is deducted on its own line rather than folded into the rate above, so you can see that not everything gets automated.

Presented in the tool as an adjustable assumption the buyer controls, with the formula on screen. No external citation is claimed, because inventing a plausible source for a real sounding report is the one fabrication a label cannot undo. Settled as a permanent end state on 27 July 2026: there is no observed dataset behind these rates, and saying so is both accurate and more persuasive than borrowed authority. Replace them the moment enough deployments produce real ranges.

What follows from your inputs

On 100.0 hours a month currently spent on this workflow. Every figure below is a range, because a single number would claim a precision these inputs cannot support.

Hours returned a month
50.6 to 69.0
Cost returned a month
$3,643 to $4,968
Cost returned a year
$43,718 to $59,616
Hours a month per person
10.1 to 13.8

Against a $5,000 fixed scope pilot, that is a payback of 4.4 to 5.9 weeks on your figures and our rate assumption.

An arithmetic consequence of what you entered, not a forecast and not a result we have measured for you.

The formula

All of it. The first line of each step is the arithmetic, the second is the same arithmetic with your figures in it.

  1. Hours spent now

    volume a month x handling minutes / 60

    100.0 hrs = 200 x 30 min / 60

  2. Rate after exceptions

    automation rate x (1 - exception rate)

    50.6% to 69.0% = 55% to 75% x (1 - 8%)

  3. Hours returned

    hours spent now x rate after exceptions

    50.6 to 69.0 hrs = 100.0 hrs x 50.6% to 69.0%

  4. Cost returned

    hours returned x loaded hourly cost

    $3,643 to $4,968 = 50.6 to 69.0 hrs x $72

  5. Payback on a $5,000 pilot

    $5,000 / cost returned a month x 52 / 12

    4.4 to 5.9 weeks = $5,000 / $3,643 to $4,968 a month x 52 / 12

The exception line is deducted separately and deliberately. Folding it into the automation rate would hide the fact that a share of this work still reaches a person.

Read this before you use the number

What this does not count.

Four things sit outside the arithmetic above. Every one of them makes the real return smaller than the figure on this page, which is why they are here rather than in a footnote at the bottom.

01

Implementation time

Building, testing and running an agent supervised takes weeks of elapsed time and some of your team's attention. None of it appears above.

02

Change management

The work has to be done differently for any of this to hold. People need to trust the output, agree what gets approved and stop keeping the old process running beside the new one.

03

Licence and running costs

Model inference, hosting and any software the workflow touches are ongoing costs. They are small next to the figures above in most cases, but they are not zero.

04

Returned hours are not money yet

An hour handed back is worth something only if it is redeployed: absorbed as extra volume without hiring, or moved to work you would otherwise have paid for. If the hour simply disappears into the day, the saving above never lands.

Read this in plain English

The same numbers written out as two paragraphs, for the person you have to explain this to.

Written from the figures above and nothing else. Changing an input clears it, because a paragraph about numbers that have moved is worse than no paragraph.

Take it with you

The result, your inputs, the assumption and the formula, in one document. We do not keep any of it unless you send it to us.

Email me this

We will send you the summary and Liam or Nick will read it before any call, so you are not repeating yourself. No sequence, no follow-up machine.

A number on a page is not a baseline.

Everything above rests on figures you estimated and a rate we assumed. The only way to know is to measure the workflow before anything is built, which is what week one of a pilot is for.

Book a scoping call See a worked example

The worked example is the measurement report a pilot produces in week six, in full, with constructed numbers and a real structure.