What is that task costing you?
Two minutes. See what a repeating task costs you in hours and money every year.
The calculator
List the tasks that repeat. Rough numbers are fine, and rounding down beats guessing high.
Salary plus employment costs, divided by hours worked. If you do not know it, salary divided by 1,700 is close enough. For a team of mixed seniority, use the middle of the band.
Hours a week
0
Hours a year
0
Annual cost
0
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In working weeks
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What this usually leads to
Knowing what a task costs is not the same as knowing what to do about it. The automation scorecard says whether this particular one is a good candidate or a trap, and process automation is what the work looks like when the answer is yes.
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A recurring task costs more than it feels like, because the cost is per year and the experience is per go. Enter how long one run takes and how often it happens. Twenty minutes twice a day is over a hundred and sixty hours a year.
What you get
Runs in your browser
The arithmetic happens on your machine.
Built for rough numbers
You do not need exact data.
Answers in hours and money
Both matter.
Two units, one number
Hours a year and money a year, from the same three inputs.
How to use this without fooling yourself
The most common mistake with a calculation like this is being generous with the inputs to make the answer impressive. Do the opposite. Round the minutes down, count only the people involved, and leave out anything you are not sure repeats. A defensible small number changes a decision. An inflated large one gets picked apart in the meeting.
Be careful with frequency in particular. People reliably underestimate the tasks that happen many times a day and overestimate the ones that happen monthly and hurt. The five-minute job done eight times a day costs far more than the ninety-minute job done once a month, and almost nobody guesses that correctly before writing it down.
Once you have the number, hire an assistant or automate the task is the decision it feeds.
Questions we get
Do I have to give you my email?
No. The calculation runs in your browser and there is nothing to sign up for. There is a button to send the list over if you want a second opinion on it, and pressing it is the only thing that transmits anything.
What hourly rate should I use?
The loaded cost of the people doing the work: salary plus employment taxes, benefits and the rest, divided by hours worked. That is typically a quarter to a half above the bare salary.
Why 46 weeks rather than 52?
To allow for leave, public holidays and the weeks where the task does not happen. Using 52 inflates every answer by about thirteen percent, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets a number dismissed.
My tasks are not weekly. How do I enter them?
Convert to a weekly average. Something monthly is roughly 0.25 times a week, something daily is 5. The field takes decimals.
Once you have the number, what automating it would give back scores whether the task is the right shape and prices the share you get.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
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What to do once you have the number.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built