Industry-Specific Calculators

What This Tool Does

Pick your sector, enter your real volumes, and get a savings projection that has the sector's non-negotiable steps already subtracted. It is aimed at the person who has run a generic automation calculator, seen a number that felt too good, and wanted to know which part of it was fantasy.

The difference is not the labour rate. It is that a regulated process and an unregulated one can look identical on a process map and behave completely differently once you automate them, because one of them has a step a human is required to perform. Generic calculators do not ask, so they cannot subtract it.

How to Read the Output

Take two firms doing what is, on paper, the same job. Both onboard 400 new clients a month. Both spend about 18 minutes per client collecting identity documents, checking them, keying the details into a CRM and filing the evidence. That is 7,200 minutes a month, or 120 hours, in both firms.

Automate the mechanical parts, and assume you do it well: 85% of the handling disappears, leaving 2.7 minutes of genuine human residual per client.

Firm A is an e-commerce business onboarding trade accounts. 400 × 2.7 minutes is 1,080 minutes, or 18 hours. The saving is 102 hours a month.

Firm B is an estate agency, and it is supervised under the Money Laundering Regulations. Same volume, same software, same 85% on the mechanical work. But its customers are onboarded online, and HMRC's guidance is explicit that a customer who is "not physically present when you carry out identification checks" triggers enhanced due diligence: obtain further information to establish identity, apply extra measures to check documents supplied by a credit or financial institution, make sure the first payment comes from an account in the customer's own name, and establish where the funds came from and what the transaction is for. Call the human review that produces six minutes per client. Residual is now 8.7 minutes, so 400 × 8.7 is 3,480 minutes, or 58 hours.

Then add the escalations. HMRC requires that where the customer is a politically exposed person, "only senior management gives approval for a new business relationship". At 1% of 400 clients, that is four cases a month that cannot be routed anywhere except a director's desk. Twenty-five minutes each is another 1.7 hours.

Firm B saves 60.3 hours a month, not 102. The generic calculator overstates its case by 69%, and it does so while getting the automation rate exactly right. Nothing in the arithmetic was wrong. The question was.

Read the output the same way. The headline saving is the mechanical work. The line beneath it, the residual, is the part you are buying forever, and in a regulated sector it is usually the larger half of the decision.

Where the Sector Adjustment Comes From

Three things, and only three.

A mandated human step. Somebody with a specific qualification or seniority must look at the item. This does not shrink when volume grows, which is why it eventually dominates. Automating around it still helps, because the human arrives at a prepared file rather than an empty screen, but it caps the ceiling.

A retention obligation. Under the Money Laundering Regulations you must keep customer due diligence records for 5 years, running from the date the business relationship ends or the date a transaction completes. Any format is acceptable, including "computerised or electronic". This is where automation projects quietly fail an audit: the evidence ends up living in workflow execution logs, and execution logs are pruned. If your n8n instance clears history on a schedule, you have automated the work and deleted the proof, so the record has to be written somewhere durable as a deliberate step. That is a real design cost and the calculator counts it.

A mandated system of record. All VAT-registered businesses are now signed up to Making Tax Digital for VAT, so anything touching sales or purchase records has to land in compatible software rather than in a spreadsheet an automation happens to update. That constrains the shape of the build rather than the hours, but it constrains which build is even legal.

Everything else in the model is ordinary arithmetic: volume, minutes per item, automatable fraction, residual per item, and a loaded hourly cost you supply yourself.

What Changes by Sector

The bottom two rows are the interesting ones. Their residual is a choice rather than a rule, which means it can be automated away later. The top four cannot, and a projection that treats those two groups the same way is the single most common reason an automation business case does not survive contact with the finance director.

For what the first build usually looks like in each of these, there are sector write-ups on voice agents for law firms, voice agents for medical clinics, workflow automation in property and AI automation for e-commerce.

Common Mistakes

Comparing your number to a published sector average. Sector averages are built from whoever was willing to answer a vendor survey, and the spread inside any one sector is wider than the gap between sectors. Use the calculator against your own before-and-after, not against a benchmark you cannot inspect.

Counting the compliance step as automatable because software can do it. Software can extract a passport number. Whether software is permitted to be the one who decided the passport was genuine is a different question, and it is the one that determines your residual.

Forgetting that the retention clock starts at the end, not the beginning. Five years from when the relationship ends means an active client of twelve years needs their onboarding evidence for seventeen. Storage is cheap; discovering the requirement during an inspection is not.

Modelling one process in isolation. Sector constraints tend to apply to a whole class of work. If enhanced due diligence caps your onboarding automation, it caps your re-verification and your file review too, and the portfolio number moves further than the single-process number suggested.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the same task have a different ROI in a different industry?

Because the automatable fraction is not a property of the task, it is a property of the task plus its obligations. In the worked example above, both firms automated 85% of the handling and one of them saved 102 hours while the other saved 60, purely because a required human review step of six minutes per client survived the automation.

Which industries get the best return from automation?

The ones whose residual step is a commercial choice rather than a legal requirement, so usually e-commerce, professional services and internal operations. Regulated sectors still gain, and often gain more in absolute hours because their processes are longer, but they gain a smaller percentage and they need the audit trail designed in rather than added afterwards.

Does the calculator handle compliance costs?

It handles the time cost of compliance steps, which is the part that changes the hours. It does not price legal advice, software certification or insurance, and it is not a substitute for asking your regulator or your professional body what you are permitted to automate.

What if my industry is not listed?

Use the closest match on the residual step rather than the closest match on the job title. A veterinary practice behaves like healthcare, a recruitment agency behaves like professional services, and a bookkeeping firm supervised for money laundering behaves like financial services regardless of how small it is.

Getting a Number You Can Take to a Decision

The honest limit of any calculator is that it models the process you described, not the process you have. The 18 minutes is an estimate someone made, the 85% is an assumption about a tool nobody has configured yet, and the residual assumes the human review takes six minutes rather than fifteen because the file arrived tidy. Sensitivity matters more than precision here: run it again with the automatable fraction at 60% and see whether the case still holds. If it only works at 85%, it does not work.

Two other tools sharpen the inputs. The time waste calculator gets the baseline minutes onto a defensible annual basis before you multiply anything, and the automation readiness assessment tells you whether the process is documented well enough to be automated at the rate you just assumed. If you are new to the vocabulary, what workflow automation actually is is the shorter way in, and n8n execution data cleanup is worth reading before you rely on execution history as your audit trail.

Where this usually goes wrong in practice is not the estimate but the build: the residual step gets automated anyway because it was easier, or the evidence is written to a log that gets pruned, and the problem surfaces two years later. That is the work I do, mostly in n8n, Make.com and small Python services, and mostly for firms that already have a number and need the thing behind it to be defensible. If you want it looked at, email me at iam.mbilalvirk@gmail.com, or start smaller through Upwork or Fiverr if a scoped piece of work suits you better than a conversation.