Admin costs are hard to point at. They never show up on an invoice. They're spread across late evenings, enquiries nobody got to, and jobs that started a day later than they could have.
Two sums put a rand figure on it.
Your time
For one normal week, write down every hour that goes on work a system could do: retyping details from one place into another, chasing payments, sending the same reminder for the fifth time, copying information out of messages. Be fussy about it. Guessing is how things get left out.
Then give an hour a value. Use what that hour would earn you if you spent it on the work you do best, or what you'd pay someone to take the admin off you.
Hours a week × value of an hour × 52
With made-up numbers: 6 × R200 × 52 = R62,400 a year.
Enquiries that go cold
Think about the messages and calls that arrive while you're on a job, in a meeting or asleep. Roughly how many a month go unanswered or get answered late? Of those, how many would have become work, and what is a typical job worth?
Missed enquiries a month × the share that would have converted × value of a job × 12
Again with made-up numbers: 10 × 1 in 5 × R3,000 × 12 = R72,000 a year.
Add the two and the example business is losing R134,400 a year to things a system could handle. Yours will be a different number, and it might be small. That is useful to know as well, because it tells you not to spend much on solving it.
If you'd rather not do the sums on paper, the Diagnostic Tool on our site does them with you. You enter your volumes, manual hours and response times, and it returns the yearly cost and the part of your business driving most of it. The calculations are plain arithmetic, done without AI.