What is it worth?

Every decision about how your office runs comes down to one question.

What's it worth?

And the answer is almost always measured in time.

Here's a way to work it out that you can use on any task, any fix, and any purchase.

It takes four numbers to price a task, and two more to price a fix.

Start with the task the way it is today.

Number one.

How long it takes, start to finish.

Everything.

Opening the files, waiting for things to load, thirty seconds making sure it looks right.

Number two.

How many times a week it gets done.

Number three.

How often it goes wrong.

Not the little slips.

The mistakes that take real time to find and fix.

Number four.

How long it takes to fix one of those mistakes.

Now put them together.

Each time the task is done, it costs the time it takes, plus the chance of a mistake times the time to fix it.

Multiply that by how many times a week it's done.

That's your hours per week.

Let's try it.

Say your office sends fifteen invoices a week.

Each one takes twenty minutes.

One in ten has a mistake, and fixing it takes forty-five minutes.

Twenty minutes, plus a tenth of forty-five, is about twenty-four and a half minutes an invoice.

Times fifteen, that's just over six hours a week.

On invoices alone.

Now turn those hours into dollars.

Use what an hour really costs you, not just the wage.

The wage, plus the taxes, the benefits, the desk and the training.

A good rule of thumb is to add a quarter to a third on top of the wage.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a bookkeeper at a specialty trade contractor earns a median of about twenty-six dollars an hour.

Add a third, and that costs you about thirty-five.

Six hours a week at thirty-five dollars is about two hundred and fifteen dollars a week.

Over a year, that's more than ten thousand dollars.

For sending invoices.

That's what the task costs.

Now price the fix.

Run the same four numbers for the task the way it would be afterwards.

Say each invoice now takes five minutes, and only one in fifty has a mistake.

That's about an hour and a half a week.

So the fix saves about four and a half hours a week.

Around eight thousand dollars a year.

Now the last two numbers, which are what the fix costs.

First, what you pay to put it in.

And count your own team's time to learn it.

Those hours cost the same as any others.

Second, what it costs to keep running, every month.

Take that off the weekly savings.

Then ask one question.

How many weeks of savings did it take to pay for itself?

Say the fix costs twenty-four hundred dollars, plus ten hours of learning.

That's about twenty-seven fifty.

At a hundred and sixty dollars a week saved, it pays for itself in about seventeen weeks.

After that, it's yours, every week, for as long as you use it.

The same math works for materials.

Material wasted per job, times jobs a week, against what it costs to stop the waste.

So that's the whole method.

Hours today.

Hours after.

What the fix costs.

And how fast it pays back.

Run it on every task in your office, and line them up.

Start with the one that pays back fastest.

And run it before every purchase, every hire, and every new program anyone wants to buy.

If it doesn't pay back, the answer is no, however good the demo looked.

And if it does, you'll know exactly what you're getting.