Should this be custom software?
Five questions about that manual process everyone quietly hates. We'll tell you what it really costs each year — and honestly whether the answer is a spreadsheet, something off the shelf, or a proper build. Sometimes the answer is "keep the spreadsheet."
Look off the shelf first.
This is costing you around £4,200 a year — real money, but an existing tool probably covers most of it. Custom only makes sense if this process is the heart of the business.
Not sure whether off-the-shelf covers it? That first conversation is free, and we’ll tell you honestly.
Ask us whichBack-of-envelope, on purpose — 46 working weeks, plus a modest overhead for errors and tool-juggling. Your real numbers are the first thing we’d work out together.
Behind the five sliders is a simple sum: the hours a task eats, the people doing it, what their time roughly costs, and a modest allowance for the errors and tool-juggling that manual work quietly adds on top. Multiply that across a working year and you get the number most businesses never actually put on paper — what a process costs to leave exactly as it is.
Custom software earns its keep when a process is core to the business, repeats constantly, and has outgrown the spreadsheet holding it together. It's the wrong answer when the task is rare, the rules change every month, or something off the shelf already does ninety per cent of it for a monthly fee. Building a tool to save two hours a year is a bad trade, and we'll say so.
That's why the calculator will happily tell you to keep the spreadsheet. It's a rough guide, not a quote — the real figure depends on your exact workflow, and working that out is the first thing we'd do together, not the last. Treat the number as a nudge toward the honest question: is this process costing enough, often enough, to be worth fixing properly? If it is, that first conversation costs nothing.