Manual Hours Register
Work out how many hours a month your business spends doing the same things by hand, and whether you are in a position to do anything about it. Ten minutes. Your numbers stay in your browser.
What an hour costs you
Not a salary divided by 2,080. Take the fully loaded cost of the person doing the work: wage, employer's NI, pension, holiday, the desk they sit at. If it is you doing it, use what an hour of your time is worth when you are doing the work only you can do.
The register
Every task somebody in the business does repeatedly, the same way, by hand. Copying numbers between two systems. Chasing the same update. Retyping a quote. Checking whether a thing happened. If you did it last week and the week before in the same way, it goes in.
| Repeated task | Times / week | Minutes each | Hours / month |
|---|
Most owners cannot produce this list from memory. Producing it is most of the value, and it is the part nobody does because nothing forces them to sit down and write it out.
Whether you can act on it
Hours are only half the answer. Automating work that nobody has written down makes the mess run faster. Tick what is honestly true today, not what you intend to sort out.
Your two numbers
The verdict appears once there is something to read.
What this version does not do
- It only sees what you already know about. The tasks that cost the most are usually the ones nobody thinks of as tasks, because they have always just happened.
- It does not tell you what to automate first. Ranking by hours recovered against difficulty is a different exercise, and the order matters more than the list.
- It does not name what should stay manual. Pricing exceptions, anything customer-facing that carries risk, anything where being wrong is expensive and hard to spot. A list with nothing on the do-not-automate side has not been thought about properly.
- It does not check your subscriptions. Software you pay for and nobody has opened in ninety days is usually the first place money comes back, and it needs a card statement rather than a memory.
Want a second opinion?
Leave your name and where to reach you. Your register goes with it, so there is nothing to copy. I will reply personally within two working days with the one task I would look at first. No pitch attached.
Sent. I will be in touch within two working days. Your register is still here if you want to keep adding to it.
What gets sent, or keep it for yourself: Copied
Nothing to copy yet.