Cost Take-Out Calculator

Your figures in, an annual range out, split into the four places the money actually sits. Every assumption visible and editable, nothing sent anywhere.

Cost take-out in information management comes from four places: content stored past its purpose, systems kept alive for what might be inside them, invoices handled by people, and time spent looking for documents that exist. Put your figures in and see where the money is. The assumptions behind the estimate are underneath, and you can change any of them.

Your estate

Employees who work with documentsOffice-based staff, roughly. Not the whole headcount.1000peopleLegacy systems kept alive for their dataApplications nobody uses for new work but nobody dares switch off.5systemsStored contentFile shares, archives, repositories. An estimate is fine.100TBSupplier invoices per year100000per year

The assumptions behind the estimate

Every figure here can be changed. If you know yours, use it. The defaults are placeholders, not benchmarks.

Share of stored content that is redundant, obsolete or trivial%Placeholder. Set from the inventory of your own estate; this is the figure that varies most.Cost to hold one terabyte for a yearCHFPlaceholder. Storage, backup, replication and the share of platform cost it carries.Annual cost of keeping one legacy system aliveCHFPlaceholder. Licence, infrastructure, the specialist who still knows it, and the security exceptions it needs.Cost to handle one invoice manuallyCHFPlaceholder. Capture, coding, routing, approval chasing and filing, as labour.Share of invoices automation removes from manual handling%Placeholder. Depends mostly on the non-PO share; PO invoices automate almost fully.Hours per employee per year spent finding documentshoursPlaceholder. Time looking for records that exist but cannot be found quickly.Loaded cost of one working hourCHFPlaceholder. Salary plus employer costs, averaged across the people counted above.Share of that search time a governed estate removes%Placeholder. Governed, classified content is found by identifier rather than by memory.

Estimated cost take-out

Total, across the four

per year, as a range

Storage0
Content removed on a rule rather than carried, migrated and searched indefinitely.
Decommissioning0
Systems switched off once the records that must survive them are extracted with their meaning intact.
Invoice handling0
Supplier invoices captured, matched, routed and posted without anyone typing them in.
Time finding documents0
Records reachable by identifier instead of by asking the person who filed them.

The high end is the arithmetic. The low end is sixty per cent of it, the discount we apply to any estimate made before anyone has looked at the estate.

Check it against your estate, free

Nothing you entered was sent or stored. This is an indication built from your inputs and the visible assumptions, not a quotation and not a business case.

How to read the result

The estimate is a range for a reason. The high end is what the arithmetic produces from your figures and the assumptions. The low end is sixty per cent of it, which is the discount worth applying to any estimate made before anyone has looked at the estate. If the low end is still worth a conversation, the conversation is worth having.

The four lines are independent of each other. An organisation with a clean archive and eight legacy systems will see almost all of its saving in one line, and that is the line to start with. Decommissioning in particular is usually the most direct cost take-out available, because the saving is a line somebody is already paying; the decommissioning page sets out why the shutdown is not the project.

What the calculator does not count

Compliance risk avoided, audits shortened, decisions made faster, and the readiness that decides whether AI can be trusted with any of it. Those are real and they are usually larger than the four lines above, but they are not figures a slider can estimate honestly, so the calculator leaves them out and the cost take-out page makes the wider case.

An estimate made before anyone has looked at the estate is a reason to talk, not a number to plan on. The conversation is where it becomes one.

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