Your company

Four numbers. Defaults reflect a 100-person mid-market company, the same profile used across the What Actually Returns series, so you can see yourself in the numbers before you change them.

Company name (for the briefing) Employees Average fully loaded cost per employee ($/yr)

What is a "fully loaded" labor cost? (worth 60 seconds)

A fully loaded cost is what an employee actually costs you per year, not just their wages. It adds employer payroll taxes, health and other benefits, retirement contributions, and workers' compensation insurance. Across US private industry, benefits average about 30% of total compensation, so a quick estimate is gross wages × 1.43 (BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026).

Estimate yours here:

Gross annual wages ($) Employer payroll taxes (% of wages, typically 8–12%) Health + retirement + other benefits ($/yr) Workers' comp rate ($ per $100 of payroll, from your policy)

If you run payroll by workers' comp class code, you can do this per role family (clerical, sales, field) and get a precise rate for each. Your payroll report by class code plus your comp policy declarations page has everything this calculator asks for. Accounting teams: this is the same buildup you'd use for job costing or prevailing-wage benchmarking.

Annual revenue ($)

Your operations

These are the numbers the model actually runs on. Staffing defaults follow published occupational shares, and role costs are benchmarked to California statewide medians. Adjust anything you know better; your numbers always win.

Support

Support / service staff Loaded cost per support role ($/yr)

Default: California median for customer service representatives ($49,560, BLS May 2025) × 1.43 load.

Sales

Annual new-business revenue ($) Contribution margin on new business %

What is contribution margin?

Contribution margin is what's left of each new sales dollar after the direct, variable costs of delivering it: materials, direct labor on that work, transaction fees, commissions. It is not net profit, because overhead stays out of it. Quick guide: revenue minus direct costs, divided by revenue. Service businesses commonly land between 40% and 60%; distribution and product businesses run lower. Your accountant can pull this from a contribution-format income statement, and if you don't have one, gross margin is a reasonable stand-in here.

Back office

People in admin-heavy back-office roles Loaded cost per back-office role ($/yr)

Default: California median for office and administrative support ($54,900, BLS May 2025) × 1.43 load. Headcount default is 11% of employees, the published occupational share.

Share of their time on automatable manual work 30%

Discount rate for NPV %/yr

What is a discount rate, and why 10%?

Future dollars are worth less than today's dollars. A discount rate converts a three-year stream of benefits into net present value (NPV): today's-money terms. We default to 10% per year, deliberately above the current US market median cost of capital in Damodaran's NYU Stern dataset, and let you set your own. If your CFO uses a hurdle rate, enter it here. The model discounts monthly against your 36-month cashflow.

Your readiness

The most consequential step. Research consistently shows the organization around the tool decides how much of the possible value is actually realized: sponsorship, manager capacity, adoption. Five honest answers.

How your answers are used: the honest version

Your five answers place you in one of three readiness bands. The band sets the share of structurally supported value the model assumes you'd realize today: 35% (Early) · 50% (Developing) · 65% (Ready). The middle anchors to the documented pilot-to-production discount on page one. The spread is a directional adjustment justified by change-management research (Prosci: projects with excellent change management meet objectives about 7 times more often than with poor), not a measured elasticity. We label it directional because that's what it is. Your answers are self-reported. This is a mirror, not a measurement, and nothing here is scored against "competitors."

Which workflows are you weighing?

Select one to three. Each card tells you what the change actually involves, and what typically kills the return.

Planned investment per workflow (planning-grade defaults by company size; overwrite with real quotes)

Customer service ($, 3-yr total)

The decision, ranked

Ranked by likely 3-year NPV at your readiness. The bars show the full benchmark range (low, likely, high) because a range is the honest shape of a forecast.

NPV, payback, and ROI in plain language

NPV is the three-year benefit stream minus your investment, converted to today's dollars at your discount rate. Positive NPV means the change creates value even after the cost of capital. Payback is the month your cumulative cashflow turns positive. 3-yr ROI is total benefits over three years relative to investment. All three come from the same monthly cashflow, with benefits ramping 50% → 85% → 100% across years one to three, because no serious implementation returns full value in year one.

Four paths, one honest table

Same engine, four arithmetic paths. No invented decline penalties, no cosmetic scenarios.

What moves the number

True sensitivity: each bar re-runs the entire model with one variable moved.

Show the math & sources

These results are modeled estimates based on your inputs and published benchmark ranges. They are not a forecast or a guarantee. Actual return on investment depends on your current state, implementation quality, organizational readiness, and factors outside this model, and revenue-side estimates carry lower confidence than cost-side estimates. Individual results vary significantly. Benchmarks are compiled and triangulated from published sources using conservative values; the full citation trail is in the source register and the evidence ledger on page one.

Get your workflow decision briefing

A print-ready briefing of your ranked decision, the readiness finding, and every source. The document you take to the meeting. Free; your email adds you to the Change Advisor research list (findings first, no marketing lists, opt out anytime).

Your calculator inputs are never transmitted or stored. The briefing is generated in your browser.

You know AI matters. What do you change first?