Admin cost calculator

There's no reliable figure just for trades. Most numbers quoted for tradies come from software companies and are hard to trace back to a real survey. Broader research gives a sense of scale. In a 2025 Censuswide survey of 500 Australian small businesses for Dext, more than one in five owners said they spend 21 to 40 or more hours a month on financial admin. The best number is your own, so jot down your admin time for two weeks and put the weekly average into the calculator.

Anything you do to run the business that you can't charge a customer for. For most tradies that means writing quotes, sending invoices, chasing payments, booking jobs and returning calls, ordering materials, bookkeeping and BAS, and compliance paperwork like certificates. Count the time you spend at night and on weekends too.

Not in cash. But paperwork at night or on weekends is unpaid time taken from rest and family, and it's often why invoices go out late. The calculator shows what those hours are worth at your hourly rate, so you can weigh up whether software or help is worth paying for.

Sort your systems first, so you aren't paying someone to run a messy process. Then compare the cost: if an hour of admin help costs less than your hourly rate, and you can fill the freed-up hour with paid work, the help pays for itself. A common rule of thumb from trade business coaches is that your first hire should be another tradie who brings in revenue, with office help once you have a few staff and you're still buried in paperwork.

A few habits make the biggest difference:

• Invoice on the day you finish, while the details are fresh.
• Keep a price list or templates for the jobs you quote most often.
• Do the rest in one set block each week, instead of dipping in between jobs.
• Let payment reminders go out automatically, so you're not chasing by hand.
• Hand bookkeeping and BAS to a bookkeeper or BAS agent.

46 weeks is 52 weeks less 4 weeks of annual leave and about 2 weeks of public holidays. A 38-hour week is the standard full-time week in Australia, which makes a working day 7.6 hours. If you work longer weeks, the dollar figures don't change, but the "working weeks" figure will be a bit lower.