The visible cost: direct labor

Start with the obvious. If an employee earns €35,000/year, their hourly cost (including employer contributions, benefits, etc.) is roughly €25–30/hour. Two hours of daily manual work costs:

If three people each spend 2 hours/day on repetitive tasks, you're spending €37,500–45,000/year on work that could be automated.

The hidden costs (the real multiplier)

Error correction

Manual data entry has an error rate of 1–3%. For every 100 orders processed manually, 1–3 will have errors that need to be found, investigated, and fixed. The downstream cost of an error (returned order, customer complaint, reconciliation time) often exceeds the original task cost by 10x.

Context switching

Every time an employee has to stop creative work to do a manual task, there's a cognitive cost. Research puts it at 20–30 minutes of lost productivity per interruption. If they're interrupted 4 times a day for manual tasks, that's up to 2 hours of diminished-capacity work on top of the manual task itself.

Opportunity cost

The question isn't "how much does this manual task cost?" It's "what could this person be doing instead?" A sales rep who spends 2 hours/day on CRM updates has 2 fewer hours for prospecting. At average deal values, that lost time can represent €50,000–200,000/year in unrealized revenue.

Morale and retention

Employees who spend significant time on mindless, repetitive tasks report lower job satisfaction and are more likely to leave. The average cost of replacing an employee is 6–9 months of their salary. One resignation driven by "too much admin work" costs you €17,500–26,000.

The automation ROI calculation

A typical automation project for a medium-complexity workflow costs €2,000–6,000 to build and €200–500/year to maintain. Stack that against €12,500–45,000/year in direct + indirect costs, and the ROI is typically 3x–10x in the first year, and compounding every year after.

Your calculation

Take your highest-volume manual process. Count how many hours/week it consumes across all staff. Multiply by loaded hourly cost. Add 50% for error correction and context switching. That's your baseline cost. Now divide by 10. That's a reasonable estimate for what automation would cost per year. The difference is your ROI.