Most automation business cases are built the same way: hours saved, multiplied by an hourly rate, minus the quote. It gets to a number quickly, and it is usually wrong in both directions at once.
Here is a method that survives contact with a finance director.
Count touches, not hours
Ask how many times a person picks up a single item of work between arrival and done. Not how long each takes — how many separate times attention has to be paid to it.
This matters because the cost of a two-minute task is never two minutes. It is two minutes plus the interruption, plus the context-switch back, plus the item sitting in a queue waiting for someone to notice it. Counting touches captures that; counting minutes does not.
Then estimate time per touch and be pessimistic. In every discovery session we have run, the first estimate has been too low.
Use the right rate
For a cost centre, use the loaded cost of the person — salary plus employer costs plus overhead, not the salary.
For a firm that bills time, use the rate you could have charged instead. This is a different exercise entirely: automation there does not reduce cost, it converts non-chargeable hours into chargeable ones. The number is usually several times larger and it is entirely defensible.
The two costs most business cases leave out
Running cost. Model usage, hosting, and — the one people forget — the person who works the exception queue. A workflow handling ninety per cent of cases automatically still sends ten per cent to a human, and that human has to exist. Budget for it explicitly; it is usually small, but a business case that omits it will be picked apart.
Change cost. Processes change. Prices change, systems get replaced, someone adds a new rule. Ask what happens when you want to change something in six months: do you call the supplier, or can your own team do it? The answer changes the five-year number substantially.
The benefit most business cases overstate
Headcount reduction. In practice, teams almost never shrink after automating a process — they absorb growth without hiring, clear a backlog that was quietly costing them work, or move onto things that were being neglected. Those are real benefits and finance directors will accept them, but they are not the same as a salary line disappearing, and claiming they are damages the credibility of everything else in the case.
The benefits people forget to count
- Speed as revenue. If quotes currently take two days and a competitor answers in an hour, some proportion of what you lose is lost to that alone. Even a conservative guess at that percentage is often larger than the labour saving.
- Errors that never happen. Not the cost of fixing a mistake, but the cost of the ones you currently absorb without measuring — the credit notes, the goodwill discounts, the rework.
- Not chasing. Both the time your staff spend chasing customers, and the time customers spend chasing you.
- Evidence. Being able to answer “why did that happen” from a record rather than from someone’s memory has a value that becomes obvious the first time you need it.
Putting it together
Annual cost of the process today, minus annual running cost after, gives the yearly benefit. Divide the build cost by that for a payback period in years.
Under a year: straightforward, do it. One to two years: sound, particularly if the process is growing. Over three years: this is a strategic decision about capability rather than an efficiency one, and it should be argued as such rather than dressed up as a saving.