At €31.22 an Hour, Manual Admin Has a Hard Payback Number

Automation proposals usually fail on vagueness. 'It will save the team time' is not a number anyone can approve. CSO data makes it one: average hourly earnings in Ireland were €31.22 in Q4 2025, up 3.4% on the year, with average hourly other labour costs adding €5.47 on top. In Information & Communication, average hourly total labour cost was €59.53.

That gives a defensible fully-loaded rate. Take a process, count the hours it consumes per month, multiply. A two-person team spending six hours a week each on re-keying orders between systems is 52 hours a month — roughly €1,900 a month, €22,800 a year, in one workflow nobody has ever costed.

Now add the compounding term. Wage growth means the cost of that process rises 3–4% annually while the cost of automating it falls — Stanford's AI Index recorded inference costs for equivalent performance dropping by roughly two orders of magnitude in eighteen months. The payback period on the same integration is shorter every year you delay, which is a reason to act, not to wait.

Two adjustments keep the case honest. First, saved hours are only a saving if they are reallocated to something that generates revenue or absorbed by growth without hiring — otherwise it is capacity, not cash, and you should say so. Second, exclude the error rate from the headline and count it separately: re-work, credit notes and lost customers from mis-keyed orders are real but harder to attribute.

The CSO context also shows why this is now urgent for smaller firms specifically. Among small enterprises, 23.3% use CRM and 29.2% use ERP — the systems that make integration cheap. The firms with the highest manual load are the ones least equipped to remove it, so the labour cost lands hardest exactly where margins are thinnest.

Pick the single highest-hour process, cost it at €36 fully loaded, and put that number on one page next to the implementation estimate. In our experience the decision usually makes itself once the arithmetic is written down — the resistance was never to the spend, it was to the absence of a number.