The Time Tax Calculator
What do your repetitive tasks cost you every year?
Add the recurring work your team does by hand. You'll see what it costs in salary, how much of it can run on its own, and how little of that actually needs AI. Sometimes the honest answer is "not worth automating yet."
The people doing the work
Only count the people who actually do the tasks you'll list, not the whole company.
Working time: 2,112 hours per person a year, assuming 8 hours a day, 22 working days a month.
This is only used to work out an hourly cost. It isn't your manual workload. You'll enter the hours each task takes in step 2.
Your recurring tasks
Click "We do this" on anything that sounds familiar. Each one adds a task with typical hours you can change. Running a startup? Start with the Startups tab.
Task list
Hours are the total across everyone who does the task. "Can automate" is our estimate for that kind of work in that tool, counting both plain automation and AI. Rows with a dashed orange border are examples: edit them or remove them.
Where the money goes, and how it gets fixed
Do you need us?
Up to nine honest questions about one task. Plenty of people finish this and don't need anyone. That's the point.
Free · Thursday Teardown
Get a personal teardown of your tasks
Akshat Gupta is a Chartered Accountant who built automated finance systems at Morgan Stanley. He'll go through your results using the Time Tax Audit framework and reply personally within 7 days. You'll get:
- A written teardown of your top tasks: what can be automated, what can't, and the order to do it in. With a detailed SOP to get you started.
- A straight answer if it isn't worth automating
Want to describe your tasks in detail? Fill in the full Thursday Teardown form. Explain the steps in your own words, send a voice note or a video, or submit anonymously.
Open the full form →How the numbers are worked out
Hourly cost = combined annual pay × overhead factor ÷ (people × working hours per person). Working hours per person = hours per day × working days per month × 12. A task done "every working day" is counted working days per month × 12 times a year. Switching currency adjusts the default pay to typical local salary levels for finance roles, not just the exchange rate.
"Can automate" starts from a typical share for that type of work, adjusted for the tool it happens in. Work done in Excel or Google Sheets is 90% automatable. Paper, bank portals and desktop software are harder. The receipt leads with our estimate. The conservative case underneath is 70% of it.
The automation vs AI split shows which part of the recoverable time needs AI (reading documents, drafting text, answering questions) and which part is plain automation (rules, scripts and links between your tools). For most finance work, AI is a small share.
These are planning estimates, not quotes. The real share depends on how clean and consistent your inputs are, which is what a teardown checks.
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