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ROI Tools

Automation ROI Calculator. See How Much Manual Work Is Costing Your Business.

Pick the calculator that matches your operation. Each one runs the math on two losses that compound silently: the hours your team spends on manual work, and the revenue that leaks through gaps automation closes. Benchmarks come from industry studies and from systems we have deployed. Inputs stay in your browser. No signups, no email gate.

Ecommerce

Runs the math on three losses most multi-channel stores carry without naming: manual order entry across Shopify and Amazon, daily channel sync time, and the abandoned cart revenue that never gets recovered without an automated email or WhatsApp sequence. A 500-order-per-month store at industry-baseline abandonment usually sees a six-figure annual loss. The calculator returns a specific number for your volume, average order value, and channel count. No email gate.

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Auto Dealer
Coming soon

Estimates the cost of slow lead response and manual inquiry triage. The Harvard Business Review study on online sales lead response (Oldroyd, Elkington, McFarland 2011) drives the close-rate model. Inputs are weekly inquiries, average deal value, your current response time in minutes, and your current close rate. Output is the deals you are leaving on the table this year and the staff hours your team currently spends sorting leads by hand.

Preview the auto dealer calculator
Logistics and Freight
Coming soon

Models the two recoverable losses most CHA and freight operators carry: documentation hours that an n8n workflow removes entirely, and demurrage charges that pile up because nobody is monitoring the alert queue. Inputs are monthly shipments, demurrage incidents per quarter, average days held per incident, and your weekly documentation hours. Output is the annual recoverable spend, with separate lines for time cost and demurrage exposure.

Preview the logistics calculator
Dental Clinic
Coming soon

Calculates the revenue lost to no-shows, the staff hours burned on manual reminder calls, and the recall patients who quietly fall off the schedule when there is no automated sequence chasing them. Inputs are weekly appointments, current no-show rate, average treatment value, and number of locations. The no-show recovery math uses meta-analyses of SMS reminder studies in healthcare.

Preview the dental clinic calculator

MethodologyHow These Calculators Estimate Your Loss

Every calculator on this page uses the same labor cost model. We take an annual salary you enter (default is $52,000 USD, the rough US median for admin and support staff), multiply by 1.3 to load in benefits, employer taxes, software, and the cost of the desk that person sits at, then divide by 2,080 standard annual work hours. That gives you a fully loaded hourly cost of about $32.50 at the default salary.

The 1.3 overhead multiplier comes from Jeffrey Hadzima's MIT Enterprise Forum piece on employee cost. It sits inside the standard 1.25 to 1.4 range that accountants use when modeling true headcount cost. If you run lean on benefits and software, your actual multiplier is closer to 1.2. If you offer richer benefits, it is closer to 1.4. You can override the salary input on every spoke.

From there, each calculator uses industry-specific time benchmarks for the manual tasks involved. Order entry takes about 3 minutes per order. Manual lead triage runs closer to 8 minutes per inquiry. Customs documentation is the biggest single block at roughly 45 minutes per shipment, and it varies hard by trade lane.

These are directional numbers. Your actuals will vary by roughly 20% in either direction depending on tool stack, team experience, and operation size. The output is meant to tell you whether automation is worth a 30-minute conversation, not to replace a custom audit.

Why Specificity MattersWhy Industry-Specific Calculators Beat Generic Ones

A generic ROI calculator hides the number that actually matters. An auto dealership's bottleneck is response time on inbound inquiries. A dental practice's is no-show rate and recall drop-off. A freight forwarder's is demurrage and customs paperwork. These three operations have almost nothing in common at the unit-economics level, even if they all benefit from automation.

Putting them through the same formula produces an average that is wrong for every individual case. The dealer underestimates because the calculator did not ask about response time. The dental practice underestimates because the calculator did not weight recall revenue. The freight forwarder underestimates because the calculator does not know what demurrage is.

Industry-specific calculators ask the right question and apply the right benchmark. The numbers you get back here are the ones you can actually defend in a conversation with your CFO or with your own head.

Frequently Asked Questions

Pre-questions about the calculators, the math, and what happens when you finish one.

Pick the one that matches your primary revenue channel. If you run a multi-channel ecommerce operation, start there. If you sell vehicles, the auto dealer calculator weights lead response time, which is where most dealerships actually lose money. The dental clinic calculator is built around no-shows and recall, which are the two losses dental owners can name from memory. Logistics is the most specific of the four and only useful if you run a CHA, freight forwarder, or in-house import operation.
Within roughly 20% in either direction. The labor cost math is standard and reliable. The industry time benchmarks are reasonable averages drawn from peer-reviewed studies where they exist and from our own deployments where they do not. Your actual losses will differ based on your tool stack, your team's experience, your operation's size, and how aggressively you currently work around the manual steps. The output is a planning number, not a contract.
No. Each calculator pre-fills industry-default values for inputs you might not have at your fingertips, like cart abandonment rate (we default to 70%, the Baymard Institute baseline) or dental no-show rate (we default to 20%, the middle of the documented industry range). You can adjust any of them. The required inputs are the ones only you know, like your monthly order volume or your weekly inquiry count. Best-guess estimates on those are fine for a directional read.
Because the cash leaving your bank account for an employee is not just their salary. It includes employer-side payroll taxes, health benefits, software licenses for their seat, retirement contributions, and the share of office rent or equipment they consume. The standard finance multiplier for all of that combined sits between 1.25 and 1.4. We use 1.3 as the midpoint. If your operation runs lean on benefits and tools, the real number for you might be 1.2. If you provide rich benefits, it could be 1.4. The calculator lets you override the salary input, which is the lever that moves the loaded cost.
Nothing automatic. The calculator does not capture your inputs or your email. If the number is large enough that you want to talk about what an automation build would look like for your operation, you can book a 30-minute audit at the bottom of any spoke page. We send a written plan within 48 hours of the call. There is no follow-up sales sequence and we do not share your inputs with anyone.

Want the version specific to your operation?

Each calculator above is built around the bottleneck for that industry. The 30-minute audit walks through your stack and your current manual work. We send a written automation plan within 48 hours of the call. No follow-up sales sequence.

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