Repeated work costs more than the payslip shows

Two people. The same document. Every week.

Receipts to be read and keyed in. Leases with the same 6 fields to pull out. Deeds to be filed. Most offices can point to the work at once.

But almost none have worked out what it costs a year. The figure is not in the accounts. It is hidden in salaries, spread across several people, and it never gets added up.

That is a pity. Your own figure is the only one worth deciding on.

The arithmetic on one line

Hours a week × hourly cost × 46 weeks.

That is the whole sum. It is also exactly what the calculator at /en/tools/ai-besparelse does. Nothing more.

46 weeks and not 52, because holiday, public holidays and sickness have to come out. Otherwise the figure is too high from the start.

Notice what is on the line. The hours are yours. The hourly cost is yours. The weeks are a calendar. The cost is not a claim from us. It is arithmetic, and you can check every factor yourself.

The three places the figure comes out too low

When a firm does the sum itself, the figure usually comes out too low. It happens in three places.

The hourly cost is taken from the payslip

That is not what an hour costs you. On top come holiday, pension, contributions and a share of rent and systems. Use the full cost. It is the one you pay.

Only one person is counted

Ask who does the work. The answer is rarely one name. It is more often "all of us, a bit". Count them all. Otherwise part of the figure is missing.

Switching time is left out

A receipt that lands in the middle of a case costs more than the minutes it takes to key in. You have to leave the case, go into the document, and come back. We leave switching time out too. It is hard to measure and easy to inflate. But that means our figure is low. Not high.

The place most suppliers get it wrong on purpose

They do not deduct review time.

An automation does not remove the task. It moves it. From "do it" to "read it and approve it". That is a big improvement, but it is not zero. A person still has to look through the fields before they become an entry or a letter.

We assume 15% of the time saved comes back as checking. We deduct it before we show you anything at all.

An estimate that does not deduct review time is not an estimate. It is marketing.

How much of it can be carried

It depends on the task. That is why the calculator shows three shares and not one.

• 45% is the cautious figure. We show it first.
• 60% is the middle.
• 75% is the top of what we see.

The shares apply to the workflows we build. Extraction from a known document. Filing. Drafts from a fixed template. They never apply to a whole job. Nobody in the office does only that.

Then there is a fourth share: none. It applies to everything where the time goes on waiting for another person. If a case sits still because a client has not replied, the problem is not the work. It is the queue. An automation does not fix that.

We would rather promise too little than too much. According to Wolters Kluwer, 65% of Danish SMEs using AI say the savings exceeded their expectations. We would like it to stay that way.

The same line works for more than documents. Calls you do not get to, the inbox, quotes, data entry between systems, follow-up, invoicing and reminders, reports. Tell us what repeats. Then we find the one that saves the most.

If you want the figure per month instead of per year, it is in What one month of waiting costs.

The next step

The audit is the same arithmetic. Just on your real tasks, and in writing.

You tell us what repeats. We map it for free and write it down within a week: hours, kroner, where to start, and one fixed price — or an honest no. It takes at most 3 hours of your time.

Get my free AI audit