What is manual order entry
costing your team?

How to calculate the ROI of purchase order automation

The return on automating purchase order entry comes down to three numbers: how many orders arrive, how much hands-on time each one takes now, and how much time is left once automation does the typing. The calculator uses this formula:

Monthly saving = orders per month × (manual minutes − review minutes) ÷ 60 × hourly staff cost

Subtract the monthly cost of the automation, and what’s left is your net saving. Divide the labour saving by the automation cost to see how many times over it pays for itself.

Choosing the right inputs

Purchase orders per month

Count the orders customers emailed to your order inboxes last month, across every brand or region mailbox. Leave out orders that already arrive through EDI or a web portal.

Minutes per order today

Time someone processing a typical order from start to finish: opening the email, finding the customer, keying each line, checking prices and saving the sales order. Manual entry typically runs 5–10 minutes of hands-on time per order, and longer for orders with many lines.

Minutes per order with APEX

With APEX, the order arrives already extracted and matched to your NetSuite customers and items. Your team checks it beside the original document and confirms it, which takes under a minute in production.

Staff cost per hour

Use the fully loaded hourly cost of the people who key orders: base wage plus superannuation, payroll tax, leave and other on-costs. This is usually well above the base hourly rate.

A worked example from production

One APEX customer, Clarus Adventure, completed 2,346 timed orders in NetSuite in a 30-day period. Taking the conservative end of the manual range, 5 minutes per order, and under 1 minute to review, each order saves about 4 minutes of hands-on time:

2,346 orders × 4 minutes = 9,384 minutes, or roughly 156 hours a month handed back.

That’s about one full-time person’s month, every month. Read how it works in practice in the Clarus Adventure case study.

What the calculator leaves out

The calculator counts only hands-on time, so the real return is usually higher. It doesn’t include:

• Errors and rework. A mistyped quantity or item code can mean a wrong shipment, a credit note and an unhappy customer. APEX flags price mismatches and unmatched items instead of guessing.
• Duplicate orders. Customers resend orders. APEX blocks duplicates with two layers of checks.
• Speed. The median time from an email arriving to the order being ready to confirm is 4 minutes, so orders reach the warehouse sooner, even at peak times.
• Peaks and growth. Order volume can grow without hiring to match, and busy periods don’t create a backlog.

See exactly what’s included on the pricing page.