The Hidden Time Thieves in Your P&L

Your P&L shows salaries, rent, and supplies. What it doesn't show? The fortune you're burning on mindless tasks that computers should be doing.

The $40,000 Copy-Paste Employee

Here's a painful exercise: Track what your team actually does for one week. You'll discover you're essentially paying someone $40,000 a year to be a human copying machine.

Take your average $50,000/year admin employee:

• 2 hours daily on data entry = 25% of their time

• 1 hour daily on report building = 12.5% of their time

• 1 hour daily moving information between systems = 12.5% of their time

  
  

That's 50% of their salary – $25,000 – spent on tasks a computer could do in seconds. Across three employees? You're burning $75,000 annually.

The Expensive Things Nobody Talks About

Meeting Scheduling Tennis

"Does Tuesday work?" "No, how about Wednesday?" "Morning or afternoon?"

Average back-and-forth: 6 emails. Time per email: 5 minutes. That's 30 minutes to schedule one meeting.

Schedule 20 meetings monthly? That's 10 hours – or $500 in salary costs if you're paying $50/hour.

The Daily Report Nobody Reads

That report your manager wants every morning? The one that takes 45 minutes to compile from three different systems? That's $18,750 per year for something that gets skimmed for 30 seconds.

Invoice Processing Mysteries

Receiving invoice → entering in system → matching to PO → getting approval → processing payment.

30 minutes per invoice × 100 invoices monthly × $50/hour = $2,500/month. That's $30,000 annually to pay your bills.

Customer Information Archaeology

"Let me find that for you" means searching through emails, spreadsheets, and systems. Average search time: 15 minutes. Do it 10 times daily? That's 2.5 hours – every single day.

Your Hidden Cost Calculator

Grab your P&L and a calculator:

1. Total salary costs: $_______

2. Estimate repetitive work percentage: ____% (be honest – it's usually 30-50%)

3. Your hidden cost: 1 × 2 = $_______

   
   

That number? That's what you're wasting right now.

The Low-Hanging Fruit Hit List

Start with tasks that are:

• Done daily or weekly

• Take 15+ minutes each time

• Follow the same steps every time

• Require zero human judgment

  
  

Common winners:

• Data entry between systems

• Regular report generation

• Invoice/receipt processing

• Email acknowledgments

• Document filing and retrieval

• Appointment confirmations

• Status update requests

  
  

What This Really Costs

It's not just the salary waste. Manual processes also create:

• Errors: Manual data entry has a 1% error rate. Those errors compound.

• Delays: Humans take breaks, get sick, go on holiday. Backlogs build.

• Inconsistency: Different people do things differently. Quality varies.

• Opportunity cost: Every hour on repetitive tasks is an hour not serving customers.

  
  

The Path to Stopping the Bleeding

Week 1: Track time on repetitive tasks

Week 2: Calculate the true cost

Week 3: Pick the most expensive task

Week 4: Automate that one thing

Repeat monthly. Each automated task is a permanent cost reduction.

The Brutal Truth

Look at your P&L from last year. Now imagine you'd automated just three repetitive tasks. How much lower would your salary costs be? How much more could your team have accomplished?

Every month you delay is another month of burning money on human copying machines. Your P&L already shows you where you're bleeding.

Time to stop the hemorrhage.