What a manual process costs, and why we won't tell you if we don't know

11/09/2026

Almost every small business has a process that someone does by hand every morning and that nobody has ever measured. Going through the emails that land in a shared inbox, copying the details of each order into the management system, replying to customers asking about a delivery date. It shows up in no budget because it costs no money: it costs time, and the time is already paid for.

Putting a price on it is a short multiplication. It takes four figures:

• how often the process happens — every day, every week, every month;
• how many cases are handled each time;
• how long each case takes;
• and what an hour costs of whoever does it.

Forty emails a day, a minute and a half each, at twenty-five euros an hour, come to about six thousand euros a year. It is a figure that changes conversations: most people who do that work estimate it as “a while”.

What we do when a figure is missing

This is the part that sets Handmetric apart from a spreadsheet with a made-up number in the empty cell.

When you describe a process, you almost never give all four figures. You say that Juan goes through the emails “every morning” and that it takes him “almost an hour”, but not what Juan’s hour costs, or how many emails there are. The usual thing would be to assume: twenty-five euros an hour is a reasonable figure, forty emails too, and out comes an annual cost that looks measured.

We don’t. If a figure is missing, the annual cost of the process comes out as “not estimable”, with the missing figure written next to it. That is not a shortcoming of the product: it is the only way for the figure we do give you to mean anything. A saving calculated on an assumed cost is an assumed saving, and the day someone checks it, it turns out to have been an extrapolation dressed up as a measurement.

The same goes for the rest: every estimate carries its confidence — high, medium or low — and, when there is one, the range it moves within. And when we add up the company’s processes, the total says how many were left out because they could not be estimated. A total over three of five processes, presented on its own, is a correct number that says something false.

What comes out of describing a process

You tell the process the way you would tell it to someone new, in prose. Handmetric turns it into ordered steps — who does each one, with which program, whether it is manual, whether it repeats the same way every time, whether it requires deciding something — and on those steps it estimates four things: what it costs a year, how much of it can be automated, what risk it carries and, putting the three together, what priority it deserves against the company’s other processes.

What the text does not say is left blank. A step whose owner is not named has no owner, and a process whose frequency is not given has no frequency: it is a question we ask you, not a gap we fill in. That blank is precisely what makes the rest believable.

If you want to know what your process costs, start with the four figures. If one is missing, you already know what the first question is.