Does it pay for itself? The arithmetic.

A system pays for itself only if the hours it takes over would otherwise have been paid for and spent on something that earns. This page is the arithmetic, so you can check it by hand. It is not a forecast, not a promise and not a client result.

Try your own numbers

The live calculator on the home page takes your staff, hours and hourly cost and works the sums below for any system. It needs JavaScript. This page shows the same sums without it.

The sums

• Cost of the work today, per year = staff × hours each per week × 52 × fully loaded cost per hour.
• Value of the hours given back = that cost × the share of the work you estimate the system takes over.
• Gonzo, first year = setup fee + 12 × the monthly fee.
• Net, first year = value of the hours given back − Gonzo, first year.
• Payback in months = setup fee ÷ (value per month − monthly fee), when that gap is above zero.

An example with invented inputs

Take 2 people who each spend 10 hours a week on the work, at $35 an hour fully loaded, with 60% of the work taken over. The work costs $36,400 a year, the hours given back are worth $21,840 a year, and that is 12 hours a week. These are the defaults on the home page calculator. They are not your numbers and they are not anyone's results.

Where the net is negative or the payback reads "Not at these numbers", that is a real answer: at those inputs the system does not pay for itself in year one.

What you would need to hand over

The other way round: how many hours a week the system has to take over, across everyone, for year one to break even. It does not depend on the share you guess.

Hours are per week, summed across your staff. Read a cell as: if the system takes over this many hours a week of work that costs this much an hour, the first year breaks even. Those hours only count if someone uses them on something that earns.

Limits of this arithmetic

• It values an hour at what you pay for it, not at what it could earn. If the freed hours earn more, the sum understates the case. If nobody uses them, it overstates it.
• It ignores tax and any third-party usage charges, which are not in the monthly fee until confirmed in writing.
• It cannot tell you what share of the work a system will take over. That number is your estimate. A person will tell you plainly on the first call whether a system can take the task at all.