Adjust the sliders to estimate the hours and labor cost your team spends on recurring reports — and what Opera could give back. Conservative by design; the methodology is below.
No black box:
Monthly hours saved = clients × reports per week × hours per report × automatable share × 4.33 (weeks per month)
Annual cost recovered = monthly hours × 12 × fully-loaded hourly rate
FTE equivalent = annual hours ÷ 1,880 working hours
The automatable share is the slider that matters: it's the portion of each report that is mechanical — pulling, filtering, pasting, recomputing, formatting, summarizing — as opposed to judgment and commentary, which stay human.
| Input | Default | Reality check |
|---|---|---|
| Hours per report | 1.5 | Simple single-channel weeklies run 0.5–1h; multi-platform reconciled reports run 2–4h |
| Automatable share | 80% | Typical for stable recurring reports; drop it for reports still changing shape monthly |
| Fully-loaded rate | $55/h | Salary × ~1.3 for taxes/tools/overhead ÷ ~1,880h; agencies often use $45–75 |
| Reports per client | 2/week | A weekly client report plus an internal pacing view is the common floor |
The deliberate omissions keep the estimate honest: no value assigned to error reduction, faster decisions, or the capacity to take on clients without hiring — all real, none counted.
A 12-client agency — 12 clients × 2 reports × 1.5h × 80% = ~125 hours a month, ≈ $82k/year at $55/h, ≈ 0.8 FTE of analyst time on data movement.
An in-house team — 1 'client' (yourselves) × 5 reports × 2h × 75% = ~32 hours a month: a workweek per month returned to allocation and creative work.