Contractors price their labour. They almost never price their admin. The calculator below shows exactly how many hours and rands disappear into scheduling, job cards, invoicing and paperwork every year — and what that time could be worth if it went into billable work instead.
The silent profit drain
Admin does not feel like a cost because it does not show up on an invoice or a materials receipt. But time has a value. An electrician charging R500/hour who spends 45 minutes on admin per job is absorbing R375 in unbilled time per job. At 40 jobs per month, that is R15,000 per month — R180,000 per year — that the business is effectively spending on paperwork without realising it.
Calculate your admin cost
Adjust the sliders for your job volume, hourly rate and the time you currently spend on each admin task. The calculator breaks down the cost by task, shows the annual total, and models what your business looks like with 80% of that time freed up.
Where the time actually goes
The six tasks in the calculator above are the ones that consume the most admin time in a typical SA contracting business. Scheduling and dispatching tends to spike on panel work where new jobs arrive via email throughout the day. Job cards take longest when they are paper-based or filled in on WhatsApp. Invoicing is slow when it has to be recreated from scratch rather than generated from a completed job card.
Insurer reporting is often invisible as an admin task because it gets absorbed into general administration, but for contractors on multiple panels it can easily run to an hour or more per day — time that shows up nowhere in the profit and loss but quietly erodes every margin.
The 80% figure is real
Contractors using PlanMyCrew consistently report 75–85% reduction in admin time per job. This is not a marketing claim — it is the natural result of automating specific tasks. When insurer emails automatically become jobs in the dashboard (eliminating manual data entry), when job cards are completed on mobile with mandatory photo fields (eliminating paper transcription), and when invoices are generated in one click from completed job cards (eliminating manual invoice creation), the cumulative saving is dramatic.
What to do with the freed time
The contractors who get the most from reduced admin time are the ones who decide in advance what to do with it. Options include: taking on more jobs with existing crew (direct revenue), spending more time on panel relationship management (protecting and growing panel revenue), or simply working fewer hours (owner quality of life). All three are legitimate and all three are worth more than the time currently spent on manual admin.
The case for acting now rather than later
Every month of manual admin is a month of lost revenue potential and a month of unnecessary cost. The payback period for job management software at current admin rates is typically 2–4 weeks — meaning the software pays for itself within the first month of use. There is no financial case for waiting.