Most operating costs get scrutinised once a year. The hours a senior team spends re-keying the same figures into a second system, or assembling a report that has the same structure every month, almost never do — because nobody itemises “half a day of a director’s time” as a cost centre. It just happens, quietly, inside work that already has a client attached to it.

01. A rough number, before the real one

You don’t need a consultant to get a starting estimate. Four inputs:

  1. How many fee-earning people are involved in the workflow.
  2. How many hours each loses to it per week — re-keying, chasing approvals, assembling routine structure by hand.
  3. What an hour of their time is worth to you — their loaded cost or their billable rate, whichever you’re trying to protect.
  4. How many weeks a year the workflow runs (usually 52, sometimes less for seasonal work).

Multiply the four together and you have an annual figure. It’s illustrative, not a measurement — we say that deliberately, because a number built on assumptions should be labelled as one. Our homepage has a live version of this calculator if you want to run your own scenario.

02. Where the hours actually go

In our experience mapping these workflows, the time rarely goes to the part of the job the person is actually paid to do. It goes to four specific places:

  • Re-keying. The same fact, typed into a spreadsheet, then typed again into the client-facing document. Every retype is a chance to introduce an error nobody catches until review — and catching it later costs more than typing it correctly once would have.
  • Evidence hunting. Source records found by whoever happens to remember where they’re filed. When that person is out, or leaves, the workflow slows to whatever speed the next person can reconstruct it at.
  • Drafting routine structure by hand. An expert assembling the parts of a report that are identical every month, before getting to the analysis that actually needed their judgement.
  • Approvals sitting in an inbox. Finished work waiting on one person to read it, with nobody able to see where it is or how long it’s been there.

None of these show up as “the project was late.” They show up as a team that’s always slightly behind, always slightly more expensive to run than the fee structure assumes — margin quietly eroding even as the number of projects grows.

03. Why a rough number isn’t enough to build from

The estimate above is useful for one thing: deciding whether it’s worth measuring properly. It is not precise enough to price a build against, and we won’t quote one from it. That’s what the Workflow Diagnostic is for — it maps one workflow end to end, quantifies the actual leakage against your own data and assumptions agreed in advance, and produces a baseline the build is later judged against. Full detail on how it’s scoped and priced is on Pricing.

The distinction matters because a build priced against a guess is a build neither side can really hold the other to. A build priced against a measured baseline is one where “did this work” has an actual answer.

04. What changes once you measure it

Sizing the cost properly usually does two things. It turns a vague sense of “we’re slower than we should be” into a specific number a finance sponsor can act on. And it usually reveals that the cost isn’t in the part of the workflow anyone was watching — it’s in the unglamorous middle: the re-keying, the hunting, the waiting.

That’s the part a connected workflow actually removes. Not by asking your experts to work faster, but by changing the path the work takes so the rekeying, the repeated drafting and the stuck approvals stop being where the hours go.

Bring one workflow that’s costing you time, margin or control, or see what the Diagnostic covers →