Manual order entry cost calculator
Work out what your order desk actually costs — in about a minute, from the people you have and what they cost — then see what automating the routine orders could free up. Real numbers from your own inputs, not a guessed time per order.
Tell us about your order desk
Count the people who read and key orders in — even part of their time. “Cost per person” is their pay plus overhead.
That’s $10,000 a month — and every order they type by hand costs you about $3.79.
This is the labour cost of doing it by hand. It leaves out two more costs — the errors a rushed desk makes, and the growth you can’t take on when the desk is full — which are real but different for every business.
What ManualOut could save you
ManualOut handles the simple orders on its own and only asks a person about the tricky ones. Drag the slider to how many of your orders you think are simple enough to be handled without someone typing them in.
An estimate based on your own guess, not a promise. To see the real number for your orders, book a quick demo and we’ll run a few of them through.
Method
How the cost and the saving are worked out
Based on what you actually pay and your own assumptions — no invented figures.
Search for the cost of manual order entry and you will find a confident range — "$8 to $15 per order" — repeated on vendor blog after vendor blog. Follow the citations and there is no study at the bottom, just a figure repeated until it sounds like a fact. So this calculator uses none of it. Every number is your own.
The labour cost is the people on your order desk times their fully-loaded pay (salary plus overhead). It is money you actually spend — not a figure reverse-engineered from a guessed minutes-per-order, which is why it does not shrink to nothing the moment you assume orders are quick to type.
Cost per order is that labour cost divided by the orders those people handle. It is your own number, from your own volume — the only per-order figure worth quoting.
The saving is that same labour cost multiplied by the share of orders you think could run without a person — a number you set, not a percentage we picked. It is the manual work automation takes off the desk; whether that becomes lower cost or freed-up capacity to grow is your call.
Two costs sit on top, and this tool leaves them out on purpose: the errors a rushed desk makes (credit notes, redeliveries, wasted stock), and the growth you cannot take on when the desk is full. Both are real, often larger, and specific to your business. The full reasoning is in what manual order entry really costs.
FAQ
Order entry cost, answered
How do you calculate the cost of manual order entry?
Take the number of people who read and key orders in and multiply by their fully-loaded annual pay — salary plus overhead. That is the labour cost. Divide it by the orders they handle and you have your own cost per order. This calculator does both from numbers you already have.
What is a realistic cost per order?
There is no universal figure — the widely quoted “$8–$15 per order” numbers trace back to other vendor blogs, not a study, so this tool uses no built-in constant. Your cost per order is your own order-desk cost divided by your own order volume.
Why base it on headcount rather than minutes per order?
Because you pay the order desk whether or not every minute is billable. Estimating minutes per order makes the cost look artificially low, while the fully-loaded pay of the people doing the work is the number you actually spend.
Does this include the cost of order errors?
No. This is the labour cost of doing order entry by hand. The downstream cost of a wrong order — the re-pick, the van slot, the credit note, the customer call — sits on top of it and is specific to your business, so it is not included here.
How much could automating order entry save?
It depends on how many of your orders are clean enough to process without a person, which is why this calculator lets you set that share yourself instead of quoting a headline percentage. The freed-up figure is the manual-entry labour on those orders — an estimate from your own assumption. The honest way to find your real number is to run your own orders through ManualOut in a demo.
See what automating that number would take
Send us one of your own orders and we will show you what ManualOut reads, matches and creates in your ERP — and what it would flag for a person.