How to run a one-week time audit of your office (free template)

The quickest way to find out whether automation is worth it for your business is to track one ordinary week of admin work. It costs each person about five minutes a day. At the end you have hours per task, a yearly dollar figure, and a short list of what to fix first.

This guide gives you the categories to track, a tally sheet to copy, the math, and a way to rank the results.

Why track instead of estimate

Ask someone how long they spend filing and you'll get a confident number. The trouble is that admin work arrives in two- and five-minute pieces spread across the day: rename a scan, forward an attachment, answer "did you get my documents?" Nobody counts those, so estimates drift low. A week of tallies replaces the guess with a record.

Step 1: Pick the people and the week

Include everyone who does repetitive office work, including the owner if you handle invoices at night. Three to six people is plenty for a first pass.

Pick an ordinary week. If your work is seasonal, like tax season or month-end close, either track a normal week and note the peak separately, or track the peak week on purpose if that's the pain you want to fix.

Tell the team why you're doing it, in one sentence: we're looking for work to take off your plate, not measuring anyone's performance. If people think the tally is a report card, the numbers get polished and the exercise is wasted.

Step 2: Track by category, not by free text

Free-text time logs are hard to add up, so use a fixed list. These categories cover most offices:

• Filing and renaming documents: saving attachments, renaming scans, moving files to the right folder
• Retyping data: copying figures or details from PDFs, emails, or forms into another system
• Routine email: answering the same questions, forwarding, confirming receipt
• Scheduling and reminders: booking, rescheduling, reminding clients or staff
• Chasing: missing documents, signatures, unpaid invoices, quote follow-ups
• Reports and updates: status emails, weekly summaries, owner or investor updates
• Onboarding new clients: collecting documents, creating folders, sending checklists
• Searching: looking for a file, an email, or a fact someone needs
• Other repetitive work: anything done the same way more than twice a week

Step 3: Use the tally sheet

Copy this into a spreadsheet or print it and keep it next to the keyboard. One tally mark equals 15 minutes. Round small tasks up to the nearest mark at the end of each day; five-minute tasks add up, and that's exactly what you're trying to catch.

Five minutes at the end of the day works better than logging as you go. People forget to log in the moment, but they can reconstruct a day while it's fresh.

Step 4: Add two notes per category

On Friday, each person writes two short notes for their three biggest categories:

1. Where it happens. Which tools are involved: Outlook, the shared drive, QuickBooks, the CRM, a paper tray.
2. What starts it. An email arrives, a client uploads something, a date comes up, a scan finishes.

These notes matter more than they look, because automation works by watching for a trigger and then doing the steps that follow. A task with a clear trigger and the same steps every time is a strong candidate. One that starts with "it depends" usually isn't.

Step 5: Turn hours into dollars

Add up each category across everyone, then use this formula:

Hours per week × fully loaded hourly cost × 48 working weeks = yearly cost

Fully loaded cost means wages plus payroll taxes and benefits. If you don't have the exact figure, a common rule of thumb is to add 25 to 40 percent to the hourly wage.

Here's a worked example for a three-person office, using illustrative numbers.

At $35 an hour fully loaded: 23 × $35 × 48 = $38,640 a year spent on those four categories.

That isn't what automation would save, because some of that time will always need a person. It tells you the size of the problem, which is usually bigger than owners expect.

Step 6: Rank what to fix first

Score your top categories on four questions:

Filing and retyping usually score well: high hours, same steps, obvious triggers, and a mistake is easy to catch. Routine email scores well if a person approves the drafts. Work that needs judgment on every item, like deciding how to handle an unusual client request, scores poorly and should stay with your team.

Step 7: Check the payback on your top item

Take your highest-ranked category and make a cautious assumption about how much of it automation could remove. Using the example above, suppose automation removes half of the filing time:

• 7.5 hours × 50% = 3.75 hours a week back
• 3.75 × $35 × 48 = $6,300 a year
• A build costing $2,500 pays for itself in under five months

Half is only an assumption. Filing often goes further than that, and judgment-heavy work goes less far. If the payback on your best item is longer than a year at a cautious estimate, automation probably isn't your first priority, and that's a useful thing to know before spending anything.

Our savings calculator runs this math for your whole team. It defaults to a conservative 30 percent.

What the audit won't tell you

A tally sheet shows where time goes. It doesn't show how the work moves: which steps could be skipped entirely, where the same data gets typed twice in different systems, or which tasks people have quietly stopped doing because there's no time. That takes watching the work happen and asking questions.

That's what our Time & Money Map does. We interview the team, watch a normal week, and hand back a ranked, priced list with payback periods. If you've already run this audit, bring your tally sheet to a free call and we'll tell you what we see in it.