What that manual step costs you. As a range, not a boast.

The calculator

Where every default comes from

Two public figures do the work, and both are named so you can check them rather than trust us.

• Base hourly wage Defaults to about $55/hour, derived from ABS Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings for full-time adults — $2,083.70 a week, seasonally adjusted, May 2026 — over a 38-hour week. ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia.
• Superannuation Fixed at 12%, the super guarantee rate applying from 1 July 2025 onwards. ATO, Super guarantee.
• Other on-costs A slider, not an assertion. Leave, payroll tax, workers’ compensation, equipment and desk vary enough by business that publishing one figure would be misleading. 30% is a conservative starting point for an office role.
• Hours on the manual step Yours. This is the input that dominates the answer and the one nobody can supply for you — which is the whole point of the section below.

The number this tool can’t give you

The hours. Everything else here is a public figure or a reasonable default, but the hours a week your business actually spends re-typing are specific to you, and a slider is a guess wearing a number’s clothes.

So count them. Take one job that has been through the whole cycle — enquiry to paid — and count every time the same details got typed into something. It takes an afternoon and it replaces the weakest input in this calculator with a real one.

We are not publishing one either, yet. When we have counted it across enough real engagements it will become a benchmark with the sample size attached, and this calculator will default to it instead of to a national average. Until then, the ABS figure is the honest placeholder and this paragraph is the disclosure.

It is worth knowing how thin that evidence base is generally. Admin hours by trade sets out the search we did across the ABS, the ATO, Treasury and the Small Business Ombudsman for an official Australian figure on admin hours, and what we found instead — which was nothing at all, and a compliance cost ratio of roughly two hundred to one between micro and large businesses. The automation benchmark covers what the official statistics do say.

How to read the answer

As a decision threshold, not a valuation. If the midpoint is smaller than a build would cost, stop — you have just saved yourself a project, and that is a good outcome from a free tool.

• Under about $5,000 a yearBelow our minimum engagement, and probably below anyone’s. Live with it, or fix the process rather than the software.
• $5,000 to $20,000Worth connecting two systems. Almost never worth a rebuild — a platform usually handles this.
• Above $20,000A build becomes arguable. Test it against the framework before assuming it.
• Above $50,000Something structural is wrong. Count it again, carefully, because a number that large usually means several leaks rather than one.

Those bands are our commercial judgement rather than measured findings, and they are stated that way deliberately. How we charge has the actual model.

What this deliberately doesn’t do

It does not ask for your email, it does not produce a PDF, and it does not tell you that you need us. A calculator that only ever returns "you are losing a fortune" is an advertisement, and you would be right to distrust the arithmetic.

It also does not model the cost of the fix, because that depends on your systems and we would be guessing. If you want that number, the Leak Check is twenty minutes and free, and about 40% of them conclude there is nothing worth building.

And it does not sum multiple leaks. Most businesses have three or four small ones rather than one large one, and adding them up on a single slider hides which is worth fixing first. Run it once per manual step and rank the answers — the ordering is more useful than the total, because you are only going to fix one of them first anyway.