Put a monthly figure on your manual work. It is a harder number than it sounds.

Every expense in your business gets questioned at some point. Rent, salaries, electricity, transport. Somebody has looked at each of them and asked whether it could be less.

Manual work is the one cost nobody questions, because it does not appear anywhere. There is no line in the accounts called doing things twice.

A rough way to price it

You do not need to be exact. Take the number of hours a week your team spends on work that only moves information from one place to another. Entering, copying, checking, matching, retyping.

Multiply by what an hour of that person costs. Multiply by four.

For a small office that number usually lands somewhere between twenty and sixty thousand rupees a month. Nobody ever decided to spend it. It is just what the work costs.

The part that is bigger and harder to see

The salary is the smallest piece.

There is the cost of being wrong. A figure copied by hand is eventually copied wrong, and the one that matters is not the small one, it is the rate on a large order or a quantity on a delivery.

There is the cost of being late. A decision taken in May on April's numbers, because April's numbers took three weeks to assemble.

And there is the cost of what did not happen. The follow-up nobody made, the customer nobody called back, the stock nobody noticed was finishing. None of these appear anywhere either.

That is the real monthly figure, and it is why this is worth looking at even when the business is doing fine.

Do the rough arithmetic for your own office. What is manual work costing you a month, and when did you last look at it the way you look at rent?

We work this figure out with owners regularly, and it is almost always higher than they guessed. Send us your numbers and we will do it with you.