Free Tool · Operations Efficiency Score

How much is manual work
costing your business?

Rate how you handle 8 parts of your operation on a simple 1 to 5 scale. See how many hours a week you lose to manual work, and what that adds up to over a year.

Built for contractors 8 workflows Takes 2 minutes

How this works

Rate each of the 8 workflows from 1 (you do it by hand) to 5 (it is fully connected and automatic). The lower the rating, the more time that task is quietly eating every week. Your hours and your annual cost update live as you move the sliders.
How many people in the office share this manual work. Most small shops start at 1.
What an hour of that office time is worth, wage plus a bit of overhead. A common starting point is $26.
The per-task times in this tool are example assumptions you can sanity-check, not an industry study. Your numbers will differ, so adjust the two fields above to your business. The full model is in the methodology panel near the bottom.

Rate your 8 workflows

What 1 to 5 means
1
By hand. Pen, paper, or a spreadsheet you type into. Nothing is connected.
2
Mostly manual. A basic tool, but you still re-enter the same info somewhere else.
3
Mixed. Software for this task, but it does not talk to your other tools, so you copy between them.
4
Mostly automatic. Connected to most of your business, with little re-typing.
5
Fully connected. Entered once, and everything that needs it already has it.

Not sure where you land? Each workflow below shows what a 1 and a 5 look like.

What manual work is costing you

Hours a week lost
0
across the workflows you rated below 5
Cost per year
$0
your hours × 52 × rate × office people
How connected your operation is
50%
Mixed. Some of your business is connected and some still runs by hand.
Right now, manual work is costing you about $0 a year. That is the ceiling a connected system is built to hand back. The number is yours, calculated from your own ratings, not an industry average.
Want this in your inbox?
Email yourself the full report as a PDF. The Excel version and the 90-day roadmap live on the resources page.

Your top 3 quick wins

These are the 3 workflows costing you the most hours right now. Fix these first, in this order, and you take back the biggest chunk of your week.

Methodology & sources

Every number here is either something you entered or simple math on what you entered. The only built-in assumptions are the example per-task times, shown in full below.

How we calculated this: the example time model

This tool uses an example time model, not an industry study. Each workflow has a typical full-manual weekly time, listed below for one office person. When you rate a workflow below 5, the tool charges a share of that time: a 1 charges the whole baseline, a 3 charges half, a 5 charges none.

Formula: hours lost per workflow = baseline × (5 − your rating) ÷ 4. Add the 8 together for your weekly hours. Multiply by 52, your hourly rate, and the number of office people for your annual cost.

WorkflowExample hrs/wk (manual)

Why no industry stat? Honest, dated time-and-motion data for small contractor offices is thin, and an "automation saves $X a year" benchmark would be a number we could not back up. So the savings figure is simply your own calculated annual cost, the ceiling a connected system is built to recover. Adjust the staff and rate fields, and treat the per-task times as a starting point to sanity-check against your own week.

From Behind the Books · The show

The episode behind this score.

Joe on why 14 disconnected spreadsheets quietly cost you hours every week, and what changes when the schedule, the field time, the receipts, and the job costing all run off one connected job instead.

Watch on YouTube →
Behind the Books · Stop running your construction business on spreadsheets YouTube

Companion toolkit

A score tells you where you stand. The workbook helps you fix it.

This score rates 8 workflows in two minutes. The free Operations Efficiency Toolkit gives you the full workbook to map every process and a 90-day roadmap to close the gaps this score just surfaced.

  • ■ Master Business Workbook (Excel) — score all 8 workflows, track office hours and annual cost over time
  • ■ Operations Improvement Roadmap (PDF) — a 90-day plan to move your lowest-rated workflows first