What is a manual process actually costing you?
Describe the process, the hours, and the team. The tool returns the annual cost, the payback period on a typical bespoke build, and the hidden costs most in-house business cases miss.
What makes a process worth automating
Three traits: it runs often, it follows rules (even fuzzy ones), and the cost of doing it wrong is bigger than the cost of doing it slow. If your process is one-off or fully bespoke per instance, it probably isn't worth automating; the setup cost eats the savings. If it's weekly, predictable, and someone spends their week copy-pasting between systems, it almost certainly is.
Why £5,000–£20,000
That band covers what a competent UK small shop charges to design, build, deploy, and hand over a bespoke automation. Under £5k means you're buying templated Zapier work, which is fine for simple glue but not for anything with real logic or reliability needs. Over £20k means the scope has grown into a multi-process programme, which can be a sensible next step once one or two builds have paid back.
What the calculator deliberately leaves out
Morale. Revenue upside from faster response times. Staff retention improvements when people stop doing the work they hate. These all show up in real builds but are too fuzzy to quantify in a two-minute form without making the output feel fake. Take whatever number the tool returns and assume the real business case is 20% to 50% better.
Questions buyers actually ask
The hours × rate maths is obvious. What it misses, and what most in-house business cases miss, is the hidden cost: rework from errors, context switching, key-person risk, and the opportunity cost of the best person on your team doing the worst work. The analysis asks about those and factors them in. The payback ranges use the £5,000–£20,000 band that covers most bespoke SMB builds.
Want a human sanity check on the number?
20-minute call. Share the output, I'll tell you where I'd push the number up or down and what I'd build first.
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