Automation ROI Calculator
What are those manual hours costing?
Automation is easy to justify emotionally and easy to get wrong financially. This puts a payback period on a specific task so you can rank it against everything else you could build.
Takes
1 min
Currency
01 — The manual task
Pick one specific, repetitive task — order entry, invoice creation, lead routing, report assembly.
Who does it today?
02 — How much can actually be automated?
Rule-based, high-volume work sits at the top of the range. Anything needing judgement, chasing people, or reading messy documents sits lower. 75% is a fair default for a well-scoped workflow.
03 — What it costs to build
Payback period
12.2 months
After that it returns about ₹14,500 every month.
- Hours saved / month
- 58
- Hours saved / year
- 701
- Equivalent headcount
- 0.33 FTE
- Net saving / year
- ₹1.8 L
- Three-year net
- ₹3.5 L
Where the time goes today
- Total hours on this task / month
- 78
- Loaded cost of those hours
- ₹25,000
- Automatable share
- 75%
- Left for humans
- 19
Assumptions behind this+
- — Loaded hourly cost of ₹320 for a executive — salary plus overheads, not take-home pay.
- — A working month is taken as 176 hours.
- — Saved hours are real only if they get reassigned to something useful. Automation that just creates idle time saves nothing.
- — Running costs are subtracted before payback is calculated.
- — We would refuse to build this if the task takes under an hour a month — the maintenance would outlive the value.
How to read it
Figures are computed in INR and converted at indicative rates, August 2026. Good for comparison, not for invoicing.
- 01
Under 12 months payback is comfortable. Over 24, automate something else first.
- 02
Saved hours only count if they get reassigned — idle time is not a saving.
- 03
The automatable share is the honest variable. Rule-based work sits high; anything needing judgement sits low.
If this is the problem, this is the work