Mission Intelligence Systems

Return calculator

Time Saving Realization

The pilot saved two hours a week per person. What is that worth?

The gross saving, the part that actually reaches the income statement once an exit is named, and the share the build needs before it pays for itself.

All readiness calculators

The math

Here is the equation, so you can argue with it.

R = (n × h × w × c) × s − B

Multiply the people by the hours saved each week, by the weeks worked, by the loaded hourly cost. That is the gross. Multiply it by the share that actually takes a named exit, and subtract what the thing costs to build and run.

n
People whose work the tool changed
h
Measured hours saved per person per week
w
Working weeks in the year
c
Fully loaded cost per hour
s
Share of the gross that takes a named exit. Zero where none is named
B
Annual build, license and run cost

Where the numbers come from

  • Measured hours saved, from timestamps on the same task before and after. A reported saving is not a measured one.
  • The fully loaded hourly cost your finance team uses, including benefits, overhead and the employer taxes.
  • The annual cost of the build, the licenses and the people who keep it running.
  • Which of the three exits has been agreed, and by whom.

Your numbers

What this needs from you

Everything stays in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and reloading the page clears it.

Only the people who actually use it on the task that got faster.

From timestamps on the same task before and after. Not from a survey and not from the vendor.

Forty six is a common figure once leave and holidays are taken out.

Salary, benefits, employer taxes and overhead. Your finance team already has this number.

A saving becomes money one of three ways. Where none is agreed, the honest answer is the first option.

Be specific and be low. This is the number every business case gets wrong.

Licenses, integration, the platform team, and the people who review what the tool produces.

The answer

The gross saving, the part that actually reaches the income statement once an exit is named, and the share the build needs before it pays for itself.

These calculate and they do not diagnose. Every field asks for a figure your organization already keeps, from a calendar, a queue, a ledger, or a ranking your team wrote down, and what comes back is arithmetic on what you entered. Nothing here asks you to rate a condition from one to five, nothing here produces a score, and no answer on these pages is a reading of your organization. Where you want a measurement rather than a calculation, the diagnostics do that and they publish what they cannot tell you as well. An answer here is exactly as good as the figure you put in, which is why every calculator names where its inputs come from before it asks for them.

Realized return

$0

against $938,400 measured

Gross saving
$938,400
11,040 hours a year
Full-time equivalents freed
5.3
Absorbed
$938,400
real hours, no exit
Net of build and run cost
-$400,000
Break-even exit share
43%
0.85 hours per person per week

What the number says

The measured saving is 11,040 hours a year, which is 5.3 full-time equivalents and $938,400 at the loaded rate you entered.

No exit is named, so the realized return is nothing. The hours are real and they are absorbed into the working day, which is what happens to a saving by default rather than what happens to it when something goes wrong.

Against $400,000 a year of build, license and maintenance, the net is -$400,000.

Break-even needs 43% of the gross saving to take an exit, which is 0.85 hours per person per week leaving the cost base rather than being freed.

What to do about it

  • Name the exit before the next approval. There are three and only three, and each one has a different owner. Until one of them is written down with a name and a date against it, this program is a $400,000 annual cost with a productivity story attached.
  • At the share you entered the program is $400,000 underwater. Either the exit has to carry more of the gross, or the build has to cost less, or the case is a strategic one and should be argued as a strategic one rather than as a return.
  • Check the hours before you check anything else. A saving people report is not a saving anybody measured, and the two have been found to point in opposite directions on the same task. Timestamps beat a survey.

Before you act on this

What this can and cannot tell you

Read this before acting on anything above. It is here to make the result more useful, not to hedge it.

  1. 1 of 4

    A reading is one vantage point, not the organization

    Every score here comes from what people could observe and were willing to report, from where they sit. A senior view stops where the information stops reaching it, and a team view is bounded by what the team has been told. That is a real signal about the organization, and it is not the same thing as ground truth. Treat a result as a claim to check against records, calendars, and the people closest to the work, not as a finding that has already been checked.

  2. 2 of 4

    A recommendation is a hypothesis, not an instruction

    What this produces is the most defensible next question given the pattern in the answers. It has no access to your funding cycle, your contracts, your regulator, your technology estate, or the person who is about to resign, and any one of those can be the real constraint while the instrument points somewhere else. The recommendation is worth acting on when your own judgment, and the evidence you can gather, agree with it. It is worth arguing with when they do not, and the disagreement is more useful than the score.

  3. 3 of 4

    Outcomes are decided in execution, by people and by systems

    Reading a diagnostic changes nothing. What changes an organization is a specific person with authority making a specific decision, and then the follow-through surviving contact with the work: competing priorities, staffing, incentives, contracts, data quality, system limits, vendors, and everything else outside these questions. Two organizations with identical results can end a year in opposite places, and the difference is what they did and what happened to them, not what they scored.

  4. 4 of 4

    Conditions move, so a result has a shelf life

    These readings describe a moment. A reorganization, a departure, a new system, or a change in demand can move a condition faster than any plan built on the old reading. Measure again rather than assuming a result still holds, and treat a number that has not moved as a question about whether anything actually changed.

What this one cannot do

Every calculator fails differently, so each says how.

Every figure here is only as good as the hours behind it, and measured hours and reported hours have been found to disagree by more than the saving being claimed. It also treats the build cost as a single annual number, when the complementary investment in process, training and review is usually larger than the technology and lands earlier, which is why a genuine gain often shows as a loss for several periods before it shows as a return. And it cannot tell you whether the exit somebody named will survive the meeting where it becomes a headcount decision.

Reading path

The argument this equation came out of, in order.

A number changes a decision only when somebody already believes the thing it measures matters. These are the pieces that make that case, shortest first.

  1. Step 1 of 3

    A Time Saving Is Not a Return

    Controlled trials show the task really is faster. A saving becomes a return only when capacity leaves the cost base, earns revenue, or cancels a planned hire, and cost behavior research finds none of that happens on its own.

  2. Step 2 of 3

    The AI ROI Gap

    MIT found that about 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots deliver no measurable return. The barrier is an organizational learning gap, not the technology.

  3. Step 3 of 3

    Your AI Metrics Measure Expense, Not Value

    Every consumption dashboard is a cost report wearing a performance costume. Consumption belongs on the expense line until an outcome is attached to it.

Where the math comes from

  • Anderson, M. C., Banker, R. D., & Janakiraman, S. N. (2003). Are selling, general, and administrative costs sticky?. Journal of Accounting Research, 41(1), 47-63. doi:10.1111/1475-679X.00095
  • Becker, J., Rush, N., Barnes, E., & Rein, D. (2025). Measuring the impact of early-2025 AI on experienced open-source developer productivity. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.09089. arxiv.org
  • Brynjolfsson, E., Rock, D., & Syverson, C. (2021). The productivity J-curve: How intangibles complement general purpose technologies. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 13(1), 333-372. doi:10.1257/mac.20180386
  • Brynjolfsson, E., & Hitt, L. M. (2000). Beyond computation: Information technology, organizational transformation and business performance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(4), 23-48. doi:10.1257/jep.14.4.23

Keep going

The other calculators, and the instruments that do measure.

Attention

Attention Concentration

We say we have eleven priorities. How many is the calendar actually running?

Alignment

Ranking Concordance

Everyone in the room said yes. Do they actually hold the same order of priorities?

Authority

Decision Latency

How long does a decision actually wait before the person who owns it makes it?

Adaptability

Signal Response Lag

The world moved in March. When did the plan move?

Where you want your organization measured rather than your own figures calculated, the diagnostics do that. See what each one answers, including what it cannot tell you.