Automation ROI Calculator
Estimate what automating a process is worth to your business — annual savings, payback period, and three-year ROI, in Australian dollars. Free, instant, no signup.
Your process
How many people spend time on this process?
Time each person spends on this task weekly.
Salary + super + overheads. Australian average is $50–$75/hr for admin/ops roles.
Well-chosen processes typically reach 60–85% automation.
Typical Australian projects run $20k–$80k for a focused automation.
Software, model usage, monitoring, and maintenance.
Your results
- Hours spent on this process each year
- 1,380 hrs
- Current annual cost of the process
- $75,900
- Net annual saving after running costs
- $45,130
- Payback period
- 10.6 months
- 3-year return on investment
- 238%
Estimates only, based on 46 working weeks per year. Real returns depend on process selection, exception rates, and implementation quality — accuracy and capacity gains are not counted here, so well-chosen projects often outperform this estimate.
Get an accurate assessmentHow to Use These Numbers
This calculator gives you the first-pass business case for automating one process: the labour cost you are carrying today, what a realistic automation rate would recover, and how quickly the implementation pays for itself. It deliberately counts only labour savings — accuracy gains, faster cycle times, and freed capacity typically push real returns higher.
If your payback period lands under 18 months, the process is worth a serious look. Typical implementation costs for Australian businesses are covered in our AI automation pricing guide, and high-payback candidates are usually document-heavy workflows like accounts payable and invoice processing.
For an evidence-based read on your whole automation opportunity — not just one process — our AI readiness assessment ranks every candidate use case by ROI in two to three weeks, or you can book a free consultation and we will pressure-test your numbers with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is automation ROI calculated?
Take the annual cost of the manual process (people × hours × fully loaded hourly cost), multiply by the share of the work that can be automated, subtract annual running costs, and compare the result against the one-off implementation cost. Payback period is implementation cost divided by net annual savings.
What is a good payback period for automation?
Well-chosen Australian automation projects typically pay back within 6 to 18 months. If your inputs show payback beyond two years, the process is usually either too small or not automatable enough to be a good first project.
What does this calculator leave out?
Deliberately conservative: it counts only labour savings. Error reduction, faster cycle times, avoided penalties, captured early-payment discounts, and staff capacity redeployed to higher-value work are not included — so real returns on well-chosen projects are usually higher than the estimate.