Toolsabout 2 min
What does manual document work cost you?
Volumes, minutes per document and how often something goes wrong: the yearly cost of typing documents in, and how much of it extraction takes over.
Your sector
Tick your document types, then change the highlighted numbers
Which documents do you type in?
What an hour costs: €/h
- 402 h
a month × min, errors in %
- 195 h
a month × min, errors in %
- 104 h
a month × min, errors in %
- 298 h
a month × min, errors in %
Typing inFixing errors
The full report by email
- The full breakdown behind the figure
- What we would do first
- A link to book a call about it
How we count
- 1Hours typing in = documents a month × 12 × minutes each ÷ 60.
- 2Hours fixing errors = documents × the share with an exception × minutes to fix one. For supplier invoices we start from Ardent Partners' 18,4 % average exception rate and 15 minutes a fix.
- 3After extraction, a share of documents goes through untouched (invoices 69 %, the level Ardent Partners reports for the best performers; contracts 40 %; other types 60–75 %, our estimates). The rest are still typed or corrected by hand, and a person spends 0,5–10 minutes checking each document.
- 4Exceptions fall by 47 %, the gap Ardent Partners measures between the best performers and the average.
- 5Money = hours × the hourly cost (Eurostat 2025 labour cost for your sector, which you can change). A full-time job is 1 760 hours a year (220 days × 8 hours).
Sources
- Ardent Partners: “State of ePayables 2025: AP benchmarks and Best-in-Class performance”Published January 2026
- Ardent Partners: “AP Metrics that Matter in 2026”2026
- CFO.com: “Metric of the Month: Accounts Payable Cost (APQC, 1,485 organisations)”February 2018
- Eurostat: “Labour cost levels by NACE Rev. 2 activity (lc_lci_lev)”2025 data, published April 2026
Want to put this in place?
A free 30-minute call: send us a few sample documents and we say what can be read automatically, how it reaches your system and what a person still checks.