What does a manually processed email really cost?
The cost of manual processing is more than typing time. A simple calculation any SME can do with its own numbers.
In most companies nobody knows exactly how much time goes into processing incoming email. Not because it’s a secret, but because it happens in fragments: between two phone calls, after lunch, on a Friday afternoon when “I’ll just enter this one quickly”.
1. The direct time
Processing a typical email – an invoice, a quote request or an order – takes a few minutes: open it, find the counterparty, copy the data, check it. If the content is in a PDF, a spreadsheet or a photo, or the sender writes free text (“same as last time”), it easily takes longer.
Run your own numbers:
- items per day × minutes per item × 21 working days = minutes per month
- divide by 60 for hours, multiply by the hourly staff cost for money
At 25 items a day and 6 minutes each, that is more than 50 hours a month – over a full working week spent copying data.
2. The cost of errors
A mistyped amount, an invoice assigned to the wrong client or an outdated address is rarely caught straight away. It surfaces at month-end close, in a complaint, in a correction – where it costs several people’s time. Try keeping a tally for a month of how many items had to be corrected afterwards.
3. The hidden risk
If processing depends on knowledge in one person’s head (“this client always sends it like that”), their holiday or departure becomes a business risk. It doesn’t show up in any spreadsheet, but everyone feels it when it happens.
What to take from this
Automation doesn’t pay off for everyone. With 3–4 such emails a day, manual processing is perfectly fine. With dozens a day and many recurring patterns, though, reviewing beats typing: the machine prepares, the person decides.
Try it with your own numbers in our ROI calculator.
