Someone on your team has a task they barely notice anymore: open one program, copy something out, open another program, paste it in. Orders from the webshop into accounting software, customer details from a CRM into a spreadsheet, stock levels from one system into another. “It’s only 15 minutes,” they say, when you ask.
The problem is that 15 minutes multiplies. Here’s the formula to work out your own number, and what to do with it once you have it.
The formula you need
You need four numbers:
- Minutes per task: how long one copy-paste cycle actually takes, including switching programs and fixing mistakes.
- Times per day: how often it happens. For orders, this usually tracks your sales volume, not the clock.
- Working days per month: typically around 21–22.
- Hourly cost: gross salary plus taxes divided by working hours, not just take-home pay.
Multiply the minutes, times and days together and divide by 60 to get hours a month. Multiply by the hourly cost for the monthly figure, and by 12 for the yearly one. This isn’t a guess, it’s arithmetic.
A worked example: orders from a webshop into accounting software
A small shop owner copies overnight orders every morning from the webshop’s admin panel into accounting software: customer name, address, products, total, shipping method. One order takes about 1.5 minutes, and there are 10 a day on average. That’s 15 minutes a day.
15 minutes × 22 working days = 330 minutes, or 5.5 hours a month. At €20 an hour, that’s €110 a month. Sounds small. Over a year, though, it’s already more than €1,300 for one repetitive task, done the same way every day, that doesn’t bring in a single new customer.
And that math doesn’t include mistakes. An address copied wrong, or an order that never gets entered because someone was rushing, costs extra on top.
Why the number feels too big to be true
Most people underestimate repetitive work because it happens in small pieces spread across the day. Nobody puts 15 minutes on the calendar the way they would a meeting. It just happens somewhere between morning and lunch, and at the end of the month there’s no line item that reads “data copying: 5.5 hours”.
The same thing plays out at team scale. When two people do similar copy work in two different systems, the total quietly doubles without anyone deciding it should.
Automation isn’t about replacing people, it’s about freeing them
This is where a false fear often shows up: “if I automate this, I lose a position.” In practice, small businesses don’t hire someone purely to copy data. It’s done by someone who also has a real job (sales, support, bookkeeping), and the copying eats into time that would otherwise go to that actual work.
The point of automation isn’t getting rid of anyone. It’s freeing up that 5.5 hours a month for something that actually brings in revenue or keeps a client happy: faster replies to enquiries, better follow-up after a sale, time to think instead of just copying.
What an integration actually costs
A simple integration between two systems (say, a webshop and accounting software) is typically a one-off project that then runs on its own without monthly human effort. Its cost should be compared not to one month’s bill, but to years of accumulated manual work:
- Work out your yearly manual-work cost (formula above).
- Ask for a quote for the integration. A simple connection often costs less than one year of the manual work.
- Look at how many months it takes to pay for itself. Usually the answer is surprisingly short.
If you want to know how many hours your team actually spends on manual copy-paste, see the automation and integrations service. Write to me about which systems your business uses, and I’ll tell you honestly whether automating them would pay off, and by how much.