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What is manual work costing your firm?
Every week, people on your team act as the pipe between systems that don't talk — re-typing, chasing, copying, reconciling. It feels like just part of the job. Priced up, it's usually one of the largest costs a small firm never sees on an invoice. This works it out from your own numbers, using a wage figure you can check.
Start with one hour.
One person, one hour a week, for a year — at a loaded UK wage of about £19 an hour — costs roughly £870. That's the atom. No firm loses just one hour, though: it loses hours, across a team, every week. So the real number is that atom multiplied by two things — how many people, and how many hours each.
| Who does the manual work | Loaded wage (+15% NI) | £/year per 1 hr a week |
|---|---|---|
| Data-entry administrator | £16.62 | £765 |
| Book-keeper / payroll clerk | £18.78 | £864 |
| Office manager | £22.08 | £1,016 |
| Blended default used below | ≈ £19.00 | £874 |
Wages: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, April 2025 (provisional) — median hourly pay excluding overtime, occupation codes 4152 / 4122 / 4141 — plus 15% employer National Insurance (2026-27 rates). The £19 blend sits between a book-keeper and an office manager; it's a rounded average of two figures on this table, not a new number. Adjust it below to fit your team.
Now scale it to your firm.
Roughly how much of a normal week does each person spend on these, done by hand? Answer generously — most owners under-count. (No · Some ≈ a bit most days · A lot ≈ a chunk of most days.)
The all-in cost of an hour: median wage + 15% employer NI. £19 is a mid-range admin blend from the table above — nudge it for your team.
That's about 3.0 hours a week each · over 46 working weeks a year
What manual work is costing you
£0 a year
That's what your firm pays, every year, to be the pipe between its own systems.
£0 a month · 0 hours a year across the team · about 0 full-time people's worth of time
Give or take: a cautious read is £0 a year; a fuller one, £0.
This is illustrative arithmetic from your own estimates, one verified wage and 46 weeks — the right order of magnitude, not a to-the-pound invoice. In real firms a few people carry most of this, not everyone evenly.
A priced cost is not a captured saving. Getting it back means fixing one process at a time, measured — not a platform and a prayer.
The first step is small
Want the biggest loops found for you?
Book a free 30-minute process audit. We'll time the worst of these together, and you'll leave with a written map of what could run itself — whether or not we ever work together.
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Every figure here — the wages, the National Insurance, the 46-week year — is sourced with the full working shown on our how-we-count page →. Prefer to price just one loop, to the minute? Try the re-keying calculator →. This tool is maintained by The Quiet Engine — custom software for UK small businesses, on a monthly retainer. The model, in 90 seconds →