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Is this task worth automating at all?

Hours a year, money a year, and how long a build would take to pay for itself. It will happily tell you the answer is no.

The task

Just so the answer reads like a sentence. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Include finding the file and the tab-switching. That's the real cost.
Across the whole business, not per person.
Wage plus tax, insurance and overhead — roughly 1.3x what you pay them. If it's you doing it, use what an hour of your time is worth doing the work you'd rather be doing.
A guess is fine — the point is to see what it would have to cost to be worth it. Put 0 to skip the payback figure.
Almost never 100%. Something always needs a person for the odd case, and chasing the last few edge cases costs more than automating the first three-quarters. 75% is a realistic starting point for a clear, repetitive task.
Saved every year—in staff time
  • Time the task takes now, a year—
  • Cost of doing it by hand, a year—
  • Hours given back, a week—
  • Hours given back, a year—
  • Full working days, a year—
  • Pays for itself in—
  • Worth over three years—

Before you treat the saving as money

  • Saved hours are only saved money if they get used. If automating this means someone goes home on time, you've bought goodwill — genuinely valuable, but it won't show up in the accounts. It becomes money when those hours go into billable work, or when it's the reason you don't need to hire.
  • Small fragments rarely come back. Two minutes saved forty times a week adds up on paper and disappears in practice. The savings you actually feel are the ones that remove a whole block — the Friday afternoon reconciliation, the end-of-month invoice run.
  • Automation isn't free to keep. Things it connects to change, and something needs to notice when it stops working. Budget roughly a tenth of the build cost a year to keep it alive, and knock that off the saving.
  • Fix the process before you automate it. Automating a bad process gets you the same bad outcome faster and makes it harder to change. If the task exists because two systems don't talk, the answer might be making them talk rather than scripting the copying.
  • Under a year of payback is comfortable. One to two years needs the task to be stable — no point building something the business outgrows in eighteen months. Over two years, do it by hand and spend the money somewhere it works harder.

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