Business case tool

Estimate the value trapped in manual work and slow decisions.

Most businesses underestimate operational complexity because it is spread across reporting, reconciliation, duplicated admin, owner time, and delayed decisions. This calculator keeps the assumptions visible so the number is useful without being inflated.

Cost of Complexity

What is manual work quietly costing each year?

A rough, honest estimate of reporting, spreadsheets, reconciliation, duplicated admin, owner time, and delayed decisions. It is a business-case tool, not a quote.

People spending real time on manual reporting, spreadsheets, and reconciliation8Anyone who regularly pulls numbers together by hand.Hours a week each person spends on that manual work8 hrsAverage across a normal week.Average loaded cost per hour for those people£38Salary plus on-costs, not just take-home pay.How much of the manual work is realistically recoverable40%Not all manual work disappears. This is the share a cleaner operating layer could genuinely remove.

Owner and leadership drag

This is often where the real cost becomes visible: senior people pulled into checking, chasing, and explaining instead of leading.

Owner or senior-leadership hours lost each week4 hrsTime spent checking numbers, chasing updates, or unblocking avoidable issues.Conservative value of that senior time£150Use a commercial value, not salary. Keep it realistic.

Include the cost of slower decisionsOptional, because it is harder to estimate. Kept deliberately modest.

Read the number properly

The number is not the whole case.

The calculator shows visible and semi-visible cost. It does not try to price every missed opportunity, customer issue, or management distraction. That keeps it credible, but it also means the real value can be higher where complexity is affecting growth, margin, or confidence.

If the number is material, the next step is to validate the assumptions against the live workflow: where time is lost, where errors happen, where decisions slow down, and what could realistically be removed or controlled.

Not sure where the issue sits? Try the Complexity Diagnostic.