Admin doesn't feel like a cost — but it is
Twelve hours of admin a week doesn't show up on a P&L. It shows up as the Friday afternoon that could have been a sales call. The evening spent reconciling costs. The Sunday morning building next week's schedule. It's invisible until you add it up.
The numbers for a 5-person team
Let's be conservative. A 5-person contracting business typically produces this admin load per week:
Scheduling and job allocation: 3 hours
Chasing cost logs from engineers: 2 hours
Building invoices manually: 2 hours
Updating spreadsheets / job trackers: 2 hours
Responding to "where is my engineer" calls: 1 hour
That's 10 hours a week. At £35/hour fully-loaded (including employer NI, pension, and opportunity cost), that's £350 a week in management time spent on admin that a system would handle automatically.
Over a year: £18,200.
The costs that never make it to the invoice
Separate from time, there's the direct cost of jobs that aren't invoiced correctly. Materials bought on site that never get logged. Labour time that gets rounded down. Call-out charges that get forgotten in the rush.
UK contractors using proper on-site cost logging typically recover £200–500 per month in costs they were previously absorbing. Over a year, that's £2,400–6,000 that goes directly to the bottom line.
Cash flow: the late invoice cost
A 5-day delay in raising invoices, on a business turning over £500k a year with 30-day payment terms, means roughly £7,000 tied up unnecessarily in receivables at any given time. That's either money sitting idle or money borrowed at cost.
What the ROI actually looks like
WorkLane Teams for a 5-person business: 5 seats × £25 = £125/month.
Conservative annual value recovered:
Admin time saved (5 hours/week × £35): £9,100/year
Missed costs recovered: £3,600/year
Cash flow improvement: £1,200/year equivalent
Total: ~£14,000/year. Cost: £1,500/year. That's a 9× return in year one.
The payback period on proper job management software isn't months. It's weeks.
