What does manual admin actually cost your business?
Five inputs. Real numbers. We'll show you the annual £ cost of recurring admin and how it compares with UK industry medians.
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
UK general median: 10 hrs/week
Below the UK general median - you may already be lean
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
The median hours-per-week number is the headline. Each breakdown lists the five biggest time sinks, three AI tools that solve them, and three quick wins to try this week.
10 hrs / week
General
Read the general breakdown →
14 hrs / week
Letting agents
Read the letting agents breakdown →
12 hrs / week
Accountants
Read the accountants breakdown →
8 hrs / week
Trades
Read the trades breakdown →
11 hrs / week
Consultancies
Read the consultancies breakdown →
15 hrs / week
Recruiters
Read the recruiters breakdown →
9 hrs / week
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.
The benchmark comparison uses median admin hours per person per week from HoursBack’s own assessment data (n=20+ UK SMEs) plus published UK SME productivity research. It’s a sense-check, not a precise measurement.