Your numbers

Your own admin hours per week Quotes, invoices, chasing paper, answering the same question twice

What an hour of your time is worth ($/hr) What you’d be doing instead — selling, estimating, running the job

Office admin hours per week Everyone else’s time on data entry, re-typing and follow-up. Zero is a valid answer.

Loaded office cost ($/hr) Wage plus payroll tax, insurance and overhead — not the hourly rate alone

Share a system could take over 40%

Start conservative. 40% is a starting guess, not a measurement; you are the one who knows how much of this is judgment and how much is re-typing.

What it adds up to

960

admin hours a year

0.5

full-time people, equivalent

$54,528

what it costs you a year

$21,811

in reach at the share above

Where to look first

Fill in your own hours above and this line will tell you which end is heavier.

Straight multiplication on the figures you entered — hours × weeks × rate. Nothing is assumed about your business except the two values in the panel below, and you can change those too.

The assumptions, and how to change them

Two numbers here are not yours yet. They are the only two the calculator supplies, they are both editable, and they are the reason you should treat the output as your arithmetic rather than our claim.

Working weeks a year 52 minus holidays and shutdown

Hours in a full-time week Used only for the “people, equivalent” figure

The starting figures are placeholders, not industry data. 8 owner hours, 12 office hours, $85 and $38 an hour are there so the fields are not empty. They are not a benchmark and quoting them as one would be inventing a statistic.
The share a system can take over is a judgment, not a measurement. We left it at 40% because that is the conservative end of what a first automation has returned for us. Drag it to 0% and the honest answer is that nothing is recoverable — which is sometimes true.
Nothing here is counted twice. Owner time and office time are priced separately and added once. If one person does both jobs, put the hours in one row.
What it leaves out is the expensive part. The bid you did not submit, the change order nobody wrote up, the pay application that went in late. Those cost more than the hours and this tool does not try to guess them.

No tracking on this page. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the arithmetic runs in your browser and the numbers are gone when you close the tab.

What is the paperwork costing you?

Your numbers

What it adds up to

Where to look first

Now the part the calculator can’t do