The paperwork is not free.
It is inside the wage bill.

The office column

A manual back office does not cost a flat amount. It costs a proportion of every person who touches it. That proportion goes up as the firm grows, because the number of things to reconcile grows faster than the number of people reconciling them. Ten operatives on one site is ten sheets. Thirty operatives across four sites, two of them subcontract, is thirty sheets, four sets of site records and a Friday afternoon spent working out which is which.

That work is real and somebody is paid to do it. The column above prices it at what the hour actually costs: the wage plus employer National Insurance plus the pension, over the working weeks left after statutory holiday. A £34,000 salary is not a £16.75 hour. It is closer to £21.

What it does not assume is that the work disappears. Forty per cent is the opening figure and it is ours, so it is the one to argue with. Somebody still reads a valuation, still signs a certificate, still rings the client. What changes is the part that is transcription: reading a figure off one document and typing it into another, then checking that the typing was right.

The site column

A week written up on Friday afternoon is an estimate. A time written by a server when somebody scanned a poster at the gate is a measurement. The two are rarely the same number.

Nobody has to be doing anything wrong for that to be true. A start nobody wrote down at the time gets rounded to the half hour it felt like. A sheet goes through the wash, or gets left in the van over a bank holiday weekend, and is reconstructed from memory on the Tuesday. A day that ran to ten past four becomes half four because half four is what everybody says. Four sites, thirty people and fifty-two weeks of that is not nothing, and it moves in one direction.

We have not put a figure on it, because there is no published UK figure worth citing and inventing one would be the exact thing this page exists to avoid. One per cent is the opening assumption, which is about twenty-four minutes in a working week. It is the least certain number here and it is deliberately the smaller of the two columns for that reason. Move it to what you believe, or take it to zero and read the office column on its own.

Why it gets worse rather than better

The thing that makes a manual run expensive is not the volume. It is the reconciling. One record in one place is a filing job. The same fact in four places, each with its own version and its own author, is an investigation, and investigations do not get quicker with practice.

That is why a firm can add a fifth site and a sixth office person and find the Friday afternoon has become a Friday and a Monday morning. The sheets went up by a fifth. The number of places a figure could disagree with itself went up by a good deal more.

What this page does not count

Only two things: office hours and site hours. It says nothing about the money that goes missing further down the job, and that is the bigger number in most firms. A variation nobody raised. A day works entry that never made it onto the application. Retention that fell due in March and was released in September because nobody was watching the date. Materials booked to the wrong job, so the job that made money and the job that lost it are both wrong. None of that is here, because putting a figure on it without seeing your records would be a guess dressed up as arithmetic.

It also says nothing about the fee. The comparison is the figure above against a quoted monthly figure, not against nothing.

And it assumes the people whose hours come back are doing something else useful with them. If the office is quiet, an hour saved is an hour saved on paper only. Most contracting firms we have met have the opposite problem, but yours might not.

What actually replaces the run

On a site running QR code clock-in, the hour arrives costed to the job at the moment somebody scans. The time is written by the server rather than read from a handset. Nobody types it twice. The application for payment is built from the same records that produced the timesheets. The day works and the variations are on it because they were recorded when they happened, not because somebody remembered on the twenty-fourth.

That is the mechanism the office column is really about. Not software that does the paperwork faster, but a record that only gets written once.

Not accounting, tax or payroll advice. The statutory figures are employer National Insurance at 15% above a £5,000 secondary threshold, and the 3% auto-enrolment employer minimum on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. Both were checked on 22 September 2026 for the 2026/27 tax year, and both are editable on the page. The four-hour opening assumption is from Sage research published in May 2025, which measured financial admin rather than the whole run. Every other figure on this page is yours.