Estimate an Automation's Payback Before You Build It

The biggest mistake we see is teams building automations on gut feeling. Something feels tedious, so it gets automated, and nobody ever checks whether the effort paid off. You do not need a spreadsheet with twelve tabs to avoid this. You need four numbers and ten minutes, and you can run the whole thing before a single line of code exists.

The core formula is simple: task frequency multiplied by minutes per task, multiplied by your loaded hourly cost, multiplied by the share of the work the automation actually removes. Frequency is how often the task happens in a month. Minutes is how long one instance honestly takes, including the small interruptions. Loaded hourly cost is not just salary — add employer taxes, benefits, and overhead, which typically pushes a stated wage up by forty to sixty percent.

The fourth number is the one people forget, and it is the most important. Almost no automation removes one hundred percent of a task. There are exceptions, edge cases, and a human still glancing at the output. Being honest here — assuming an automation removes seventy or eighty percent of the effort rather than all of it — is what separates a useful estimate from a fantasy. When in doubt, round the savings down and round the effort up.

Treat the result as a decision tool, not a promise. The point of the estimate is not to predict the exact euro figure you will save; it is to tell you whether a task is clearly worth automating, clearly not worth it, or somewhere in the murky middle. If conservative numbers already show a payback within a few months, you have your answer. If it only works when you assume everything goes perfectly, that is a signal to wait or pick a different task.

We built a savings calculator into the otonit site for exactly this reason — you can plug in your own frequency, minutes, and hourly cost and see the range in a minute. It will not make the decision for you, and it is deliberately conservative. But it turns a vague feeling of 'this wastes a lot of time' into a number you can defend, which is precisely the conversation worth having before anyone starts building.