What this estimate assumes
The figure this calculator produces is a ceiling, not a forecast. It assumes the hours you enter are genuinely spent on the repetitive part of the work rather than on the judgement wrapped around it, that the fully loaded hourly cost includes employer contributions and not just salary, and that automation removes the task rather than moving it somewhere else in the process. Real projects recover a share of that ceiling — commonly half to three quarters on a well-chosen workflow — with the remainder going to exception handling, review time and the cases the rules do not cover.
Where automation ROI actually comes from
For most businesses the saving is not the headline labour cost. It is the second-order effect: enquiries answered in minutes instead of the next morning, invoices that no longer sit in a queue, a CRM clean enough that the pipeline number can be trusted. Those are harder to enter into a calculator and usually larger than the hours line, which is why we set a single agreed metric at the start of a project — response time, cost per case, error rate — and measure that rather than arguing about a modelled figure afterwards.
What it deliberately leaves out
This model excludes implementation cost, ongoing platform and model spend, and the internal time your team gives to a project, because all three depend on decisions that have not been made yet. A rough rule while scoping: a focused first workflow is usually a few weeks of build, and running costs are dominated by volume rather than by licence count. Once a workflow is scoped we replace this estimate with real numbers for that specific build, and if they do not clear the bar we say so.