What does manual admin actually cost your business?
Five inputs. Real numbers. We'll show you the annual £ cost of the admin you are actually doing.
Your situation
Your numbers
Annual cost of this task
£8,050
The wage cost of doing this task manually across your team for a full UK working year (46 working weeks).
Hours per week
5 hrs
Hours per year
230 hrs
What this means
Worth a 30-minute look
£5,000-£15,000 in admin time is the easy range. One good automation usually pays for itself inside three months.
UK admin benchmarks by industry
Each breakdown lists the five biggest time sinks, three AI tools that solve them, and three quick wins to try this week.
Work out your number
General
Read the general breakdown →
Goodlord: 76% say admin limits growth
Letting agents
Read the letting agents breakdown →
Put a number on the unbillable hours
Accountants
Read the accountants breakdown →
Count the evening paperwork
Trades
Read the trades breakdown →
Price your unbillable week
Consultancies
Read the consultancies breakdown →
See the hours between placements
Recruiters
Read the recruiters breakdown →
Price the quiet admin
Retailers
Read the retailers breakdown →
Get the full UK industry breakdown
A one-page benchmark for your industry: the common time sinks, what they cost, and where most owners recover hours first. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
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Manual admin compounds quietly. A 20-minute task done twice a day, five days a week, looks tiny on the calendar. Costed honestly across a year, it can erase a full month of profit on a small team.
We take your five inputs and multiply them out: hours per task × times per week × hourly rate × 46 working weeks × number of people. Forty-six is the UK working year (52 minus 4 weeks holiday minus roughly 2 weeks of bank holidays and sick). We round the output to the nearest £10 to keep the headline calm.
Where our numbers come from
There is no reliable UK data on how many hours a week a business loses to admin. We went looking - the FRC, ICAEW, ACCA, Propertymark and the main sector surveys publish nothing on it. So we do not print a figure and call it the UK average. The calculator uses your hours and your rates, and nothing else. Where we do quote a survey, we name it and tell you who paid for it.