ROI worksheet
Work the numbers in hours. Hours are the unit you can count honestly, they are the unit your team recognises, and they convert to money using your own loaded rates rather than an average we made up.
If you have completed the AI opportunity audit, use the hours-per-week figures from your shortlist. They are better inputs than a gut estimate.
The worksheet#
For each workflow on your shortlist, write down four numbers.
Time the task for one real week. Not how long it should take. How long it took.
Count everyone who touches the workflow, including the person who checks the work and the manager who chases the stragglers. The hidden hours are almost always in the handoffs.
Hours per week × people affected × 4.33, which is the average number of weeks in a month.
Apply 70%, not 100%. A well-designed system keeps humans on review gates, exceptions and judgment calls, which is the reason it can be trusted at all. See How we work.
That fourth number is your monthly hours reclaimed. Multiply by twelve for the annual figure.
Turning hours into a decision#
Convert to money in your own spreadsheet, using your own loaded hourly cost, which is salary plus benefits, tools and overhead rather than base wage. Base wage understates what manual work actually costs you, often by a third or more.
Then compare that against the quote for the work. We do not publish prices, because a number that fits every business fits none of them, and you get a fixed number in writing before anything starts. See How pricing works.
If you are unsure of your inputs, run the worksheet twice, once conservative and once realistic. If even the conservative case pays back quickly, the decision is easy and you can stop analysing.
What this worksheet leaves out#
It counts displaced hours only. It does not model reduced error cost, or revenue impact from faster follow-up and wider reach. We count those in measured ROI only when they are directly attributable to the system, so treat your worksheet figure as a floor rather than a ceiling.
From estimate to measured ROI#
This worksheet answers “is this worth a conversation?” An engagement answers it properly. We capture a baseline before anything is built, every deployed system logs its own runs, and your FDE reports measured hours displaced against that baseline every month.
The ROI methodology documents the formula and the exclusions. The 5x ROI guarantee is measured over the 30 days after deployment using exactly that method.
Bring the filled-in worksheet to a discovery call. Walking in with “this workflow eats about 60 hours a month across four people” makes the scoping conversation immediately concrete.
Next steps#
- AI opportunity audit — find the workflows worth running through this worksheet
- How we measure ROI — the measured version of this estimate
- Measuring ROI — what to track once systems are live