How Much Could You Save?
Through digitisation?
Usually more than you think.
Every business runs on a hundred small manual jobs — rekeying the same data twice, chasing paper, copying numbers between spreadsheets, hunting for the file someone saved to their desktop. None of it feels expensive. Added up across a year, it is.
This isn’t a fringe idea, either. In government-backed research, over 9 in 10 UK firms that adopted digital tools reported real benefits — mostly time saved and costs cut. And if Britain’s smaller businesses lifted productivity by just 1%, the economy would gain an estimated £94 billion a year.
So before we talk software, let’s talk numbers. Move the sliders below and see what your manual admin is quietly costing — then we’ll show you where it goes.
Run the numbers
An honest, back-of-envelope estimate. No email required.
Your numbers
Drag the sliders. The estimate updates live →
Where the savings come from
Admin & paperwork
Research suggests many small firms lose the equivalent of around a month a year to financial admin alone — invoicing, reconciling, correcting mistakes. Automating the repetitive parts hands that time back to the people you hired to grow the business.
Getting paid on time
More than half of UK small firms get paid late, and late payment is linked to roughly 50,000 business closures a year. Automated invoicing, reminders and reconciliation get money in the door faster — and take hours of chasing off your desk.
Proven tools, real gains
This isn’t wishful thinking. Independent UK research estimates a CRM adds up to ~18% to sales per employee over three years, with cloud accounting around 12%. The right system pays for itself and then keeps paying.
The gap is the opportunity
Around half of small firms still don’t use a CRM, and a quarter of the very smallest use no digital tools at all. If your competitors are still on paper and spreadsheets, the headroom is yours to take first.
We’ve done this before
Paper job-sheets → live system
For W.M. Montgomery & Sons we replaced paper job-sheets and vehicle walk-rounds with a live work-order system — real-time job tracking, staff assignments and a full audit trail, with office and field teams finally working from the same picture instead of a clipboard and a phone call.
End-of-month guesswork → clean records
For a farm-management operation we digitised employee work-logs and overtime submission — turning scattered paper and end-of-month guesswork into a clean, approvable record that staff fill in once and managers sign off in minutes, not afternoons.
Curious what your real number is?
The calculator is a starting point. A free 30-minute consultation — no jargon, no obligation — is where we map exactly where your time goes and what it’s worth.
Sources: Department for Business & Trade, SME Digital Adoption Taskforce final report (2025); Ipsos for DBT, Understanding technology adoption among UK SMEs (2025); Enterprise Research Centre, Technology Adoption and Productivity and Micro-business Britain; ONS, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (2025); Federation of Small Businesses, Time is Money (2023). Figures on admin time and invoice-chasing draw on Sage (2025) and Intuit QuickBooks UK (2025) and are indicative. The calculator gives an illustrative estimate based on UK averages, not a guarantee — your figure depends on your own workflows.