Borrowd
The £40,000 spreadsheet: what your manual processes really cost
In almost every discovery call, someone says “it only takes ten minutes.” They're usually right. The problem is that it takes ten minutes, forty times a week, for three people.
We’re not here to tell you spreadsheets are bad. Spreadsheets are brilliant. But when one becomes the place where orders, stock and invoices meet, someone is copying data in and out of it by hand, and that time adds up fast.
The sum we run on every call
It isn’t sophisticated. Take each repetitive task, then multiply how long it takes by how often it happens, how many people do it and what an hour of their time costs once you include overheads.
| Task | Hrs/wk | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Re-keying orders into Xero | 8 | £10,300 |
| Updating the stock spreadsheet | 6 | £7,700 |
| Chasing unpaid invoices | 5 | £6,400 |
| Monday sales report | 4 | £5,200 |
| Fixing the mistakes from all of the above | 8 | £10,300 |
| Total | 31 | £39,900 |
An illustrative estimate for a typical small business, not a specific client. Based on £28/hour including overheads, over 46 working weeks.
The last line in that table is the one people forget. Manual processes don’t just take time, they create errors, and fixing errors usually takes longer than doing the job right the first time.
That's a full-time salary going into copy-and-paste.
So should you automate all of it?
No. Some of those tasks need a human, and some are cheaper to leave alone than to automate. In this example, automating the first four and keeping a person on the exceptions and checking might leave around six hours a week of manual work, about £7,700 a year.
If a project like that cost a one-off £9,000, the sum would look like this: £39,900 down to £7,700 saves roughly £32,200 a year, so the system would pay for itself in about three and a half months. Your numbers will differ, and a real quote depends on the systems involved, but the shape of the calculation is the same.
The point isn’t to automate everything. It’s to know the number, so you can decide which jobs are worth fixing first.
Try it yourself
Grab a pen and list every task someone does more than twice a week that involves moving information from one place to another. Estimate the hours, apply the sum and see what you get. If the number surprises you, we’d be glad to talk it through.