What does that broken process actually cost per year?
Every clunky approval chain and duplicate status report has a price, and it compounds across headcount. This calculator turns lost hours into an annual dollar figure, then flips the question for the budget meeting: how little does the fix have to save before it pays for itself within a year?
Operations Starter Goal Seek free
After you install, this is the model to open.
What a Broken Process Costs per Year
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
At the defaults the broken process costs several times what the fix does, and goal seek shows the break-even bar is startlingly low.
- Annual friction cost
- $1.84M 150 people x 3 hrs/week x 48 weeks at $85/hr
- Payback at defaults
- 6.1 months, if the fix saves 15 min/person/day
- Break-even time savings
- 8.1 min/person/day for a 12-month payback
- 3-year net value
- $1.24M after the $250K fix and $40K/yr ongoing
The process quietly costs $1.84M a year, and the $250K fix pays back in 6.1 months at the default assumptions. Goal seek makes the case bulletproof: the fix only has to save 8.1 minutes per person per day, under a quarter of the time the process burns, to pay back within 12 months. That is the sentence to open the budget meeting with.
The model
A twelve-row model prices the friction, then tests a fix against it. The defaults describe a mid-size process problem: 150 people, a $250K fix, realistic adoption.
| Employees stuck in the process | 150 |
| Hours lost per person per week | 3 |
| Loaded hourly cost | $85 |
| Minutes the fix saves per day | 15 |
| Adoption rate | 70% |
| One-time cost of the fix | $250,000 |
| Ongoing cost per year | $40,000 |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
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Every model like this one, and the method behind them: What-if analysis in Google Sheets.