Published on 29 October 2026
What does manual data entry cost? Work it out yourself.
Your team retypes data from documents every day. Three numbers show what that costs per month.
How do you work out what manual data entry costs?
Count the documents per day, time the minutes per document and multiply the hours per month by your labour cost per hour.
You need three numbers. How many documents come in per working day? How many minutes does one document take, from opening it to saving it? What does an hour of the colleague who does it cost?
A worked example. Say 40 documents come in per day and each one takes 3 minutes. That is 120 minutes a day, so 2 hours. A month has about 21 working days. That makes 42 hours a month. At a labour cost of €35 an hour, retyping costs €1,470 a month.
These are example numbers. Yours can be higher or lower. That is why there is a calculator below.
Work it out with your own numbers
Fill in how many documents come in per day, how long one document takes and what an hour costs.
Hours of retyping per month
42 hours
- By hand
- €1,470/mo
- With Vink (Business)
- €249/mo
Based on 21 working days a month and 1 page (10 credits) per document. Your team still spends some time on the values Vink flags.
Which minutes do you count?
Everything from opening to saving, and the time spent fixing mistakes afterwards.
The typing itself is only part of the work. Someone opens the email or the scan. Then they look up the right customer or order in the system. Then comes the retyping, and a second look to check it.
Count the time that comes later too. A colleague asks what a document said. A number is wrong and someone finds out where it went wrong. Those minutes are not in the planning, but they are part of the cost.
What do retyping mistakes cost?
A typo often costs more time than the retyping itself, because someone has to find and fix it later.
A wrong amount ends up on an invoice. A wrong quantity ends up in the stock. A wrong date ends up in the planning. Usually someone notices the mistake days later, somewhere else.
What that costs differs per company. So count for one month how often a retyping mistake comes back, and how long fixing it takes.
How do you measure the numbers for your own team?
Count the documents for one week and time ten documents from opening to saving.
Let the team keep a tally of the documents that come in for one week. Then take ten ordinary documents and time each one. Take the average.
For the hourly rate, use the labour cost of whoever does the work: gross pay plus employer costs. If you don't know that number exactly, ask whoever runs payroll.
What do you do with the result?
You see which kind of document costs the most hours. Start there.
Work out the sum per kind of document. One flow often takes far more time than the rest. The checklist for your first process helps you pick where to start. Start with one process explains how to expand after that.
With Vink, nobody retypes those documents any more. Vink puts the data in your systems. You only check the values Vink isn't sure about. A page costs 10 credits. The pricing page shows which plan fits your volume.
Questions about the cost of manual data entry
It differs per document. A short receipt is quicker than an invoice with many lines. Measure it yourself: time ten documents from opening to saving and take the average.
The labour cost per hour of whoever does the work: gross pay plus employer costs. The salary alone gives a number that is too low.
Yes. Checking is part of the time per document. With Vink there is still a check, but only for the values Vink isn't sure about.
A page costs 10 credits. Plans start at €49 a month. You start with 200 free credits, no credit card.
By Rob van Baaren, founder of Vink. Updated 29 October 2026.
Work it out with your own documents. Start with 200 free credits.
Already a customer? Log in
200 free credits. No credit card.