Free tools Manual work cost calculator · two minutes: What is manual work costing you?
Tick the jobs your team still does by hand and adjust the numbers to match your business. You get the cost a year, the share that is typically recoverable and the fix for each, biggest first.
What good looks like
The published benchmarks.
Where well-run finance teams sit on the same processes. The gap between the median and the top quartile is mostly automation.
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$5.83
median cost to process one supplier invoice
Top-quartile teams do it for $2.07 or less; the bottom quartile spends $10 or more.
Source: APQC, via CFO.com (opens in a new tab) -
20 min
to process one expense report, on average
And 19% of reports have errors or missing information, each taking another 18 minutes to fix.
Source: GBTA Foundation (opens in a new tab) -
6.4 days
median time to close the month
Top-quartile teams close in 4.8 days or less; the bottom quartile takes 10 or more.
Source: APQC, via CFO.com (opens in a new tab)
More on closing the gap: automating invoices and expenses, closing the month faster and reports that build themselves.
FAQs
How it works.
Something else? Send us a message, or email hello@fd-consulting.example.
Contact usHow is the cost calculated?
For each process: hours a month = volume a month × minutes each ÷ 60 (or the hours you enter directly). Cost a year = hours a month × 12 × your loaded cost per hour. The processes are then added up and ranked.
Where do the recoverable shares come from?
They are the planning figures we use before we have seen a business: 70% for invoice entry, 80% for re-keyed orders, 60% for expense claims and monthly reports, and 50% for reconciliations, payroll prep, debt chasing and stock updates. They are deliberately cautious. The real figure depends on your systems and volumes, which is what the diagnostic measures.
What is a loaded cost per hour?
Salary plus the costs that come with it, such as superannuation or pension, payroll tax, leave and overheads, divided by the hours actually worked. As a rough guide, a $75,000 salary works out at about $55 an hour.
Is the saving guaranteed?
No. This is an estimate from your own inputs. The diagnostic replaces it with a count, process by process, from your actual numbers, with the workings shown.
Count it properly, from your own figures.
The diagnostic works it out process by process, ranks every fix by the hours it recovers, and shows the workings.