Put in the hours, what the hour costs you, and the price of the build. You get the annual cost of doing it by hand, the month it pays for itself, and where you sit after three years.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and there's no email box.
Across everyone who touches it, not just one person. Count the chasing and the double-checking, not only the typing.
Wages plus on-costs, not your charge-out rate. For an owner's own time, use more.
Nothing goes to zero. Someone still handles the exceptions.
Prefilled at the middle of my usual band for a single automation, $4,000 to $8,000 + GST. Holding a quote from someone else? Use theirs.
Licences, hosting, support. Often zero when it sits on software you already pay for.
Comfortably inside a year, which is where most of these are worth doing.
A year is counted as 46 working weeks, which is 52 less leave and stat days. Three-year net is three years of saving minus the build and its running costs. Figures exclude GST.
Three numbers decide the whole thing and two of them are guesses. Here is where they go wrong.
The hours figure is almost always low. Whoever does the job counts the forty minutes of typing and forgets the ten minutes finding the right file, the chasing when a number doesn't match, and the fact that it lands at 4pm on a Friday when they were meant to be somewhere else. If you want a number worth trusting, get the person doing it to write down the time for two weeks first.
The hourly figure is what the hour costs you: wages, ACC, KiwiSaver, the phone, the ute, not your charge-out rate. For an owner it's worse than the number suggests, because the hour spent re-keying invoices is an hour not spent quoting, and that hour is worth a lot more than $45.
"How much of it goes away" is where the optimism lives. Nothing goes to zero. Someone still opens the exceptions, still checks the first fortnight of output, still deals with the supplier who sends a photo of an invoice. The page defaults to 70% because that is roughly where the honest ones land.
None of it counts the things without a dollar figure either. Quotes going out the same day instead of Thursday. Not carrying the job in your head at 10pm. Those are usually the reason people are glad they did it, and they are not on this page.
Under about two hours a week, don't build anything. Fix the process or buy a subscription. The maths can be made to work on paper and it will not work in real life, because a build that saves ninety minutes a week doesn't get used properly, and anything that isn't used saves nothing.
If the process changes every few months, leave it alone as well. You pay to change the build every time it moves.
And if an off-the-shelf tool already fits about 90% of how you work, buy the tool. I don't resell any of them, so there is nothing in that recommendation for me. If you are still choosing between two, every comparison is indexed here. If you already pay for several and want the annual total, that's the stack cost checker.
The field is prefilled at $6,000 because straightforward single automations land between $4,000 and $8,000 + GST. Bigger builds, a custom CRM or a job-tracking system, run $10,000 to $22,000. Those bands live on the services page, and what a custom Power App costs in New Zealand breaks them down for the Microsoft side. For the shape of the argument, build versus subscriptions, not another set of numbers, there's what custom automation actually costs a Canterbury trades business.
If you want an exact number instead of a band, that is what the Workflow Review is for. $3,500 + GST, a written plan with the hours and the cost against each option, and it's yours to keep whoever ends up building it.
Multiply the hours a week by 46 working weeks to get the annual hours, multiply that by what the hour costs you in wages and on-costs, then take the share of the task that genuinely disappears. That is the annual saving. Divide the build cost by one month of that saving and you have the payback in months.
Not your charge-out rate. Use what the hour costs you: wages, ACC, KiwiSaver, phone and vehicle. For an owner it is usually higher than it looks, because the hour spent re-keying invoices is an hour not spent quoting.
Under about two hours a week, fix the process or buy a subscription instead. Also skip it when the process changes every few months, because you pay to change the build each time, and when an off-the-shelf tool already fits about 90% of how you work.
Straightforward single automations typically land between $4,000 and $8,000 + GST. Bigger builds such as a custom CRM or job-tracking system run $10,000 to $22,000. A Workflow Review at $3,500 + GST gets you an exact number before you commit.