The short answer
Manual work costs the hours it takes multiplied by the full employer cost of an hour, plus the cost of fixing its mistakes, plus the cost of the delay it causes. In Latvia, an hour of an average employee costs the company about €16.30 in 2026. One person spending eight hours a week retyping data therefore costs roughly €6,000 a year in time alone, before a single error is fixed.
Here is the calculation step by step, with official numbers, so you can redo it with your own team's wages and tasks.
What does an hour of work cost?
The salary is not the cost. On top of the gross wage, the employer pays state social insurance contributions (VSAOI), which in 2026 are 23.59% in the standard case.
Sources: Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, wages and salaries Q2 2026; PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Latvia (2026 rates). Eurostat puts Latvia's average hourly labour cost in 2025 at €16.3, which matches.
Wages differ a lot by sector: the Central Statistical Bureau reports €3,257 a month in IT and €1,256 in hospitality. Use your own payroll numbers. The method stays the same.
The maths for one person and one task
Take one person who spends eight hours a week copying data: orders from email into the accounting program, or customers from the CRM into a spreadsheet.
The time is the visible part. Errors come on top. In a controlled study by Barchard and Pace (2011), people typing data once made errors in roughly 1% of entries, and checking by eye barely helped: visual checking produced about 30 times more errors than entering the data twice and comparing. It was a lab study, but it is a fair warning: a person who checks their own typing still lets most mistakes through.
What an error costs depends on where it lands. A wrong quantity on an order means a return and a second delivery. A wrong bank account on a supplier invoice means a payment chased for weeks. A wrong number in the monthly report means a decision made on bad data. Price your own last three mistakes: the hours spent fixing them and anything lost. Most teams find it is more than the time cost.
The third cost is delay: an order entered tomorrow instead of now, a lead answered after the competitor did. It is the hardest to measure and often the largest, so at least list where it happens.
When does automating it pay off?
Compare the yearly cost with the one-off cost of removing the work. A single integration between two systems, such as orders from email into accounting, typically costs €1,200 to €3,600 to build (see How much does custom software cost?). Against roughly €6,000 a year of time alone, it pays back within months, and the error cost disappears with the retyping.
Illustrative example. Running costs of the integration (a small monthly fee) are left out for simplicity; the cost of errors and delays is not included, so the real payback is usually shorter.
To measure your own error rate, take a sample of 100 records entered last month and check them against the source. It takes an hour and replaces guesses with a number.
The savings calculator does this calculation task by task, with the maths visible, and What should a small company automate first? helps you decide which task to start with.
