What one automated process is actually worth

Automation ROI gets dressed up in a lot of nonsense — "10x productivity", "digital transformation", percentages with no source. You don't need any of it. For a repetitive process, the value comes from exactly three places, and you can put a number on each one yourself.

1. The hours, priced honestly

Take the hours the process eats per week, multiply by the fully-loaded hourly cost of whoever does it (salary plus taxes and overhead — not just the wage), multiply by 52. A process that takes 8 hours a week at a true cost of €15/hour is €6,240 a year. That's the number a build has to beat — and notice it's an ongoing yearly saving against a one-time build cost.

2. The errors that stop happening

Manual data entry produces errors even under careful conditions — around 1% of entries in controlled studies, and more in messy real-world workflows. Errors have real prices: a mispaid invoice, a lost order, an hour of hunting down why two systems disagree. Estimate how many errors the process produces a year and what the average one costs to fix. For document-heavy processes this number is often bigger than the hours number — it's also the one everyone forgets to count.

Source for the error-rate claim: Barchard & Pace (2011), Computers in Human Behavior — single-entry data entry error rates of roughly 1% in a controlled study.

3. The things that stop falling through

Some process failures don't cost time — they cost the deal. The quote request that sat unread for four days. The follow-up that never went out. This value is real but hard to number honestly, so treat it as the tiebreaker rather than the headline: if two processes score similarly on hours and errors, automate the one where delay loses you customers.

What to subtract

Honest ROI subtracts the full cost: the build itself, any tool subscriptions it introduces, and maintenance — automations break when the software underneath them changes, and someone has to fix them. If a vendor's ROI story doesn't mention maintenance, it isn't an ROI story, it's a brochure.

When the answer is "don't bother"

If the process is rare, cheap, and its errors are harmless, automation is a hobby, not an investment. We say this on discovery calls regularly. The point of doing the maths first is that it makes the decision boring — which is exactly what a good investment decision should be.

This calculation is what the number in our guarantee is built on: before a sprint starts, we agree the hours-saved target in writing, and if the build misses it within 30 days of going live, you get a full refund. ROI you don't have to take on faith.