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Brain Matrix Labs — Estimator

What is repetitive work actually costing you?

Put a defensible number on the manual work in your business: annual hours, loaded cost, and the share that is realistically automatable. Everything is calculated in your browser and nothing is sent to us.

Your situation

Currency

Only count people whose week contains meaningful repetitive admin.

Re-keying, chasing, copying between systems, assembling reports.

hrs

Salary plus employer costs, tooling and overhead. Your figure, not an average.

$

Roughly how many separate workflows this covers.

55%

Structured, repeatable steps with a clear right answer — as opposed to judgement, negotiation or exception handling.

What that adds up to

Annual hours on repetitive work

6,900 hrs

150 hours a week across 25 people, over 46 working weeks.

Loaded cost of that time

$280,814

Based on an implied $41 per hour.

Automation opportunity — hours

1,898 – 3,036 hrs

Roughly 1.1+ full-time equivalents of capacity at the conservative end.

Automation opportunity — value

$77,224 – $123,558

Per year, once implemented and adopted.

Twelve-month payback threshold

$77,224

A one-off implementation cost below this figure pays back inside a year, even at the conservative end of the range.

How we would sequence it

With 4 processes, we would sequence rather than parallelise — start with the one that is highest volume and lowest judgement, prove the pattern, then reuse it.

This is an estimate of opportunity, not a projection of savings. Most organisations redeploy the recovered capacity rather than remove cost, and the value shows up as throughput, accuracy or shorter cycle times instead of a smaller payroll. We would want to measure the real baseline before anyone commits to a number.

Assumptions behind this estimate
  • 46 working weeks per year, allowing for leave, public holidays and absence.
  • 1,720 working hours per year used to convert annual cost into an hourly loaded rate.
  • Of the work you identify as rule-based, 50%–80% is treated as realistically removable in the first twelve months.
  • The remainder covers exceptions, judgement, and the supervision that automated steps still need.
  • No allowance is made here for implementation cost, change management or ongoing maintenance.

These constants are deliberately conservative and are published so you can challenge them. Change any input and every figure updates.

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How to read this

The number is a starting point, not a case

Three things determine whether this opportunity is real in your business.

  1. 01

    Is the work genuinely rule-based?

    The single biggest source of error in automation business cases is counting judgement work as structured work. If a step requires knowing the customer, negotiating, or interpreting something ambiguous, it is not automatable — though the steps either side of it usually are.

  2. 02

    Does the data exist where you need it?

    Automation is mostly an integration problem. If the information lives in a system you cannot reach programmatically, the cost changes shape entirely. This is worth checking before anyone builds a business case.

  3. 03

    Will the recovered time be used?

    Recovering four hours a week across twenty people only creates value if that time goes somewhere deliberate. Organisations that decide in advance what the capacity is for get a return; those that do not tend to absorb it invisibly.

Questions

About this calculator

How do I know what to put for repetitive hours per week?

Ask three people to keep a rough tally for one week. Count anything where they are moving information rather than deciding something: re-keying, chasing, copying between systems, assembling reports. Most teams are surprised by the total, and the surprise is usually upward.

Why does the result show a range rather than a single number?

Because a single number would be false precision. Between half and four-fifths of clearly rule-based work is realistically removable in the first year; the rest is exceptions, judgement and the supervision automated steps still need. Showing the band is more honest than picking a point inside it.

Is this a savings figure I can put in a business case?

Not as it stands. It is an opportunity estimate. Most organisations redeploy recovered capacity rather than remove cost, so the benefit shows up as throughput, accuracy or shorter cycle times. For a business case you need a measured baseline of the actual process, which is one of the first things we do in an engagement.

What is the payback threshold telling me?

It is the implementation cost at which the project would pay for itself within twelve months, using the conservative end of the range. It is a sanity check on any quote you receive — including ours.

Does this account for implementation and maintenance cost?

No, and that is deliberate. Implementation cost depends on your systems, your data and your integration surface, and any figure generated from five inputs would be invented. The payback threshold is there so you can test a real quote against the opportunity.

Related

Where to go next

Next step

Turn the estimate into a measured baseline.

On a strategy call we look at one real process end to end and tell you what we would automate first, what we would leave alone, and what it would take.

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