How Much Is Admin Really Costing Your Business Each Year?
Enter your team size and salary info below. We'll show you the true cost of manual work and how much you could recover by automating it.
Knowledge workers spend an average of
15 hrs/week
on automatable admin
That's
37.5%
of a standard working week
Up to
70%
of that can be automated today
If your team spends time chasing emails, updating spreadsheets, formatting reports, or manually copying data between systems, those hours have a real salary cost attached to them, and most business owners underestimate it by a significant margin.
This calculator takes your team size, average salary, and estimated admin hours to show you the true annual cost of manual work, how many of those hours could realistically be automated, and the value your business could recover by doing so.
Admin Cost Calculator
People who handle admin, comms, reporting, or data work
Gross salary per team member in that group
Per team member. Include: email chasing, data entry, manual reporting, copying between systems
15 hrs/week is the industry average for knowledge workers
For professional services firms. Unlocks the revenue impact, not just cost saved.
How to use this calculator
Start by entering the number of people in your team who regularly handle knowledge work: client communications, reporting, data entry, document management, or anything that involves moving information between systems.
Add your average annual salary for those team members. The admin hours slider defaults to 15 hours per week, which is the industry average for knowledge workers. Adjust it based on your honest assessment. If you're not sure, track one team member for a week and note every task that felt repetitive or could have been handled by a system.
The optional billable rate field is for consultancies, agencies, legal, financial, or any firm that charges clients by the hour. It converts recovered time from a cost saving into an actual revenue opportunity, which is usually the more powerful number.
How admin costs compound in a growing service business
Most business owners think of admin as a minor irritation rather than a strategic cost. The numbers tell a different story. When a team member earning £40,000 per year spends 15 hours each week on tasks that could be automated, that's nearly £15,000 in salary being allocated to work that doesn't require a human. Multiply that across five people and you're losing £75,000 per year to processes a well-designed automation could handle in seconds.
The compounding effect is what makes this particularly damaging. Admin doesn't just cost money. It degrades the quality of the work that does require human judgment. When your best people spend their mornings chasing approvals, copying data between spreadsheets, or formatting reports, they arrive at the high-value work later, more tired, with less capacity for the thinking your clients are actually paying for.
The most common automatable tasks we find across service businesses include:
- Email routing, follow-up sequences, and client update notifications
- Data entry and cross-system synchronisation (CRM, accounting, project management)
- Report generation, formatting, and distribution
- Document creation from templates: proposals, contracts, onboarding packs
- Appointment scheduling and calendar coordination
- Invoice creation, chasing, and reconciliation
- Internal status updates and approvals workflows
None of these require significant AI. They require clear processes, the right tools, and someone who knows how to connect them. That's what the M.A.P. Method (Map, Automate, Productise) is designed to do, and it's the framework behind every AI implementation we run at Montaj Digital.
Got Any Questions? We have the answers.
If your question is not answered here, book a FREE AI readiness call and we can discuss it in detail.
Research by McKinsey consistently shows knowledge workers spend around 28 hours per week on emails and internal communications alone, far more than their actual core job. Our figure of 15 hours on specifically automatable admin tasks is deliberately conservative. It accounts only for structured, repeatable tasks that a system could handle today. The true number for your business is almost certainly higher once you track it honestly.
Ready to recover these hours?
Book a free 60-minute AI Implementation Audit. No pitch, no obligation. Just a clear picture of where your admin time is going and exactly what it would take to automate it.
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