Free Tool
Reporting Hours Calculator
Manual reporting looks free because it never shows up as a line item. It shows up as hours. Enter three numbers and see what pulling numbers by hand costs your team every year.
Your reporting math
Everyone who pulls, formats, or reconciles numbers. Not just the report owner.
Pulling data, building decks, copying numbers between platforms, answering what happened last week.
Salary plus benefits, taxes, and overhead, divided by working hours. An estimate is fine.
80 is a starting assumption, not a promise. Drag it to whatever you find believable.
The starting values are placeholders, not industry data. Replace them with your own numbers.
What it adds up to
Hours per month
0
Hours per year
0
Annual cost of manual reporting
$0
At 80% automated
Hours back per year
0
Dollars back per year
$0
The math, in the open
Hours per year = people × hours per week × 52Hours per month = hours per year ÷ 12Annual cost = hours per year × loaded hourly costHours back = hours per year × automation %Dollars back = annual cost × automation %
How to use this
Get the inputs right, then look at the last line
Count every person who touches reporting, not just the analyst who owns the deck. The media buyer who screenshots dashboards on Friday. The coordinator who pastes platform numbers into a spreadsheet. The manager who reformats all of it for leadership. Reporting time hides across a team, which is exactly why nobody budgets for it.
Use loaded hourly cost, not salary. Loaded cost is what a person costs the business in total: pay, benefits, payroll taxes, software, and overhead, divided by the hours they work. If you do not know it, estimate. The result moves with the order of magnitude, not the decimal.
Then look at the automated line. Reporting is repetitive, rule based work on a fixed schedule, which makes it the clearest first candidate for automation. Reporting that writes itself is usually where we start, because the same thesis applies across the whole operational layer: multiply output without adding head count. See how the full system fits together on our Marketing Systems page.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What should count as manual reporting time?
Any hour a person spends making numbers presentable instead of acting on them. Pulling data from ad platforms. Copying it into spreadsheets or slides. Formatting the same deck every week. Answering the question of what happened last week by hand. If someone does it on a schedule and the steps rarely change, count it.
Is 80% automation a real number or a guess?
It is an assumption, and it is yours to change. That is why it is a slider and not a fixed claim. Reporting is repetitive, rule based work, the same pulls and the same formats on the same schedule, which makes it one of the easiest jobs in marketing to automate. Set the slider wherever you find it believable and the math updates.
What is a loaded hourly cost?
Salary is only part of what a person costs. Loaded cost adds benefits, payroll taxes, software seats, and overhead, then divides the total by working hours. You do not need a precise figure. A rough estimate still shows the scale, because the result moves with the order of magnitude, not the decimal.
Ready to get those hours back?
A Performance Audit maps where your reporting hours go and what to automate first. Built from running $100M+ in managed spend. Fixed scope, and you keep the plan either way.
Start with a Diagnostic Call