Free tool
Document processing cost calculator
Work out what handling customer orders, supplier invoices, or delivery notes by hand costs you a year, and how quickly automating them could pay back. It's free, it runs in your browser, and every result is an estimate shown as a range.
Your estimate
Enter your numbers and your estimate appears here: the yearly cost of handling documents by hand, the likely savings, and the payback.
How it’s calculated
- Documents a year = documents a month × 12.
- Processing cost = documents a year × (minutes per document ÷ 60) × loaded hourly cost.
- Rework cost = documents a year × error rate × (minutes per document ÷ 60) × loaded hourly cost. This assumes fixing an error takes as long as handling the document once.
- Yearly manual cost = processing cost + rework cost.
- Estimated savings = 50% to 80% of the yearly manual cost. Some documents will always need a person, so this is a range, not a promise.
- Payback, in months = price ÷ (yearly savings ÷ 12). The shortest payback uses the lowest price and the highest savings, and the longest uses the highest price and the lowest savings.
- Prices: an operations assessment (£4,000–8,000 + VAT / $5,000–10,000) plus an order desk automation sprint (£20,000–40,000 + VAT / $25,000–50,000), and the assessment alone. UK prices exclude VAT.
- Money is rounded to whole pounds or dollars, and payback to a tenth of a month, only for display.
Questions
- How is the cost of manual document processing calculated?
- Each document's handling time is costed at your loaded hourly cost, and the time spent fixing errors is added on top. The full formula is on this page, and it's the same one the calculator uses.
- What is a loaded hourly cost?
- What an hour of someone's time really costs you: wages plus employer costs such as pension, benefits, and payroll taxes. If you're not sure, start with the hourly wage and add your employer costs.
- Is anything I enter sent to Webika?
- No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
- How accurate are the savings?
- They're an estimate, not a measurement. We show 50% to 80% of the manual cost because some documents will always need a person. The operations assessment measures your real numbers.
- What does the operations assessment include?
- It maps your document-heavy processes, costs them properly, and produces a prioritised automation plan. It costs £4,000–8,000 + VAT / $5,000–10,000.
Talk it through first
30 minutes, booked online. Free, with no obligation.