ROI Analysis
Automate vs Do It Manually: How Much Are You Losing?
A single repetitive manual task costs a Quebec SME an average of $17,360 per year. Automating it costs about $80/month. Do the math.
Manual work has an invisible cost. When an employee spends 2 hours daily on data entry, email sorting, or follow-up calls, it seems "free", but that's over 500 hours per year. At $35/hour (salary + overhead), that's $17,360 swallowed by a single repetitive task. Multiply by the number of manual processes in your business.
Comparison Table
| Criterion | Manual | Automated (SAI) |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost (1 process) | $17,360+ (employee time) | ~$960/year ($80/month) |
| Error rate | 5 – 10% | < 0.1% |
| Processing time | Hours | Seconds |
| Availability | Business hours | 24/7 |
| Scalability | Linear (+ employees) | Near-free |
| Human dependency | Total | Minimal |
The 5 most commonly automated processes
1. Data entry (invoices, CRM, accounting): average savings of 15h/week. 2. Document management (collection, verification, filing): 864h/year saved for one of our clients. 3. Follow-ups (emails, calls, reminders): 3x response rate. 4. Report generation (dashboards, KPIs, exports): from 2h to 2 minutes. 5. Lead qualification (forms, incoming calls, scoring): 40% more sales.
The impact of labor shortages
In Quebec, 47% of SMEs are affected by labor shortages. In Laval, manufacturers left $770M in revenue on the table over 2 years due to staffing shortages. Automation doesn't replace your employees: it frees them from tasks nobody wants to do, so they can focus on value-generating work.
Real case: 864 hours and $30,240 saved
An accounting firm managing 6 construction projects was losing 144 hours per project per year on manual document collection (CCQ, CSST, insurance). SAI deployed an automation system handling the entire workflow. Result: 864 hours and $30,240 saved per year, with zero errors.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which processes can be automated?
- If a process follows predictable rules and repeats more than 5 times a week, it's probably automatable. Examples: data entry, email sending, document sorting, follow-ups, reports.
- How long before seeing ROI?
- On average, our clients achieve ROI in 3 to 6 months. Simple processes (like email automation) show returns within weeks.