Home › Cost of manual reporting calculator

What is manual reporting costing your team?

Building the same reports by hand every week adds up fast. Enter three numbers and see the annual cost — and how many hours you could reclaim by generating reports straight from the source file.

£28,080
per year spent producing reports by hand
936 hours / year
Reclaimable: £19,656
655 hours back

Annual cost = people × hours/week × 52 × hourly cost. Reclaimable = annual cost × automatable share. Estimates only — adjust the inputs to your team.

Stop rebuilding reports by hand

DataHub Pro turns your spreadsheet into a dashboard and a branded report in one click — so that reclaimed time is real. Free to try.

Start free — no card needed →

Embed this calculator

Drop it on your site or blog — it links back with a "Made with DataHub Pro" credit.

How it's calculated

The annual cost is simply the labour of producing reports: people × hours per week × 52 weeks × fully-loaded hourly cost. The "reclaimable" figure applies your automatable-share estimate — the portion of that recurring work that disappears once reports are generated from the source data instead of rebuilt by hand each cycle. It deliberately ignores the harder-to-price costs (errors, delays, analyst burnout), so it's a conservative floor, not a ceiling.

FAQs

How do you calculate the cost of manual reporting?
People who build reports × hours each per week × 52 × fully-loaded hourly cost. This tool does it instantly and also estimates the hours you'd reclaim by automating most of it.
What is a fully-loaded hourly cost?
Salary plus employer costs (pension, NI, benefits, overheads) ÷ working hours. Rough rule of thumb: annual salary ÷ 1,500. A £45,000 analyst ≈ £30/hour.
How much reporting time can automation save?
Teams typically automate 60–80% of recurring report production once dashboards and exports come straight from the source file. The default here is a conservative 70%.

Related: automated reporting software · Excel to dashboard · best AI tools for Excel (finance)