Every week you wait costs you hours.

    AUTOMATION ROI / EDITABLE SCENARIO

    What does automation change after review and exceptions?

    Estimate time released, ongoing effort and cash costs separately. The starting values below are illustrative assumptions, not customer results or typical savings. All results are available without an email address.

    Your workload and costs

    Use comparable task effort when estimating exception share. Exception handling is extra work beyond routine review. Add monitoring labor to review and exception effort, or to monthly cost, once. Avoidable cash means an expense you can actually stop paying, such as overtime, a retired service or a vendor invoice. Unchanged salaries are not cash savings.

    Scenario results

    Baseline weekly work
    30 h
    Work remaining manual each week
    12 h
    Routine review each week
    2.7 h
    Additional exception handling each week
    0.9 h
    Net weekly capacity released
    14.4 h
    Annual value of capacity (not cash savings)
    $26,208.00
    First-year setup and recurring costs
    $21,000.00
    Annual avoidable cash expense
    $0.00
    First-year net cash impact
    -$21,000.00
    First-year cash ROI
    -100.0%
    Setup payback from monthly net cash
    Not reached under these assumptions

    How the model works

    Automated baseline hours = hours per person × people × adoption share. Net released hours subtract routine review and additional exception handling from those automated hours. Annual capacity value = released hours × loaded labor rate × 52. A negative value stays negative.

    First-year cash impact = 12 × avoidable monthly expense − 12 × recurring monthly cost − setup cost. Cash ROI divides that net impact by first-year costs. Setup payback divides setup cost by monthly avoidable expense minus recurring costs, and is unavailable when that monthly difference is zero or negative. Capacity value is never added to cash savings.

    The model assumes a constant weekly workload and 12 months at the entered run rate. It does not model ramp-up, seasonality, taxes, financing, discount rates, added revenue, service quality or risk reduction. Setup and monthly costs are your inputs, not ToBa prices. Use a month-by-month budget if rollout timing or payment schedules matter.

    Replace assumptions with a measured pilot

    1. Measure the existing task volume, active handling time, waiting time and failures for a comparable period.
    2. Choose one workflow and document who owns normal processing, exceptions, customer consent and recovery.
    3. Record actual adoption, human review, failed attempts, retries, charges and any expense retired. Compare the same workload and quality threshold.
    4. Have the process owner approve the evidence and costs before publishing a case study or expanding the workflow.

    Download the baseline, exception and cash-evidence worksheet

    Discuss a workflow in a free automation audit · Read the ToBa blog