Every run in the window laid over one week. Darker is busier. The uptime watchdog is left out here: it fires every five minutes, so including it would shade all one hundred and sixty eight squares the same and tell you nothing.
A shorter window than the rest of the page, and deliberately so: the system keeps the detail of a run for fourteen days and then clears it, so this is as far back as the counts go. These are the numbers a model bill is built from.
| Job | Shape of the 30 days | Runs | Min each | Hours back | Recording | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purchase Invoices to Draft Bills last run just now | 462 | 4 | 30.8 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Client Records Chase last run 40 min ago | 338 | 3 | 16.8 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Practice Mailbox Triage and Routing last run 3 min ago | 822 | 1 | 13.6 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Companies House Deadline Watch last run 06:13 | 42 | 8 | 5.6 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Engagement Letter Issue and Chase last run 37 min ago | 26 | 12 | 5.2 h | dynamic | Live | |
| VAT Return Reminder Cycle last run 07:19 | 42 | 6 | 4.2 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Weekly Practice Dashboard last run 07:40 | 10 | 25 | 4.2 h | dynamic | Live | |
| New Client Onboarding and ID Request last run 23 Jul 11:46 | 16 | 15 | 4.0 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Website Enquiry Capture last run just now | 24 | 5 | 2.0 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Weekday Timesheet Chase last run 24 Jul 17:44 | 40 | 2 | 1.4 h | dynamic | Live | |
| Out-of-Hours Acknowledgement last run yesterday 21:33 | 114 | 0 | not counted | fixed | Live | |
| Legacy Client Portal Sync last run 3 Jul | 5 | 0 | not counted | fixed | Off |
If this run had not happened, what would a person have had to do instead, and how long would that take? That question sets every figure below. None of it is read off the machine: how long a computer takes to do something says nothing about how long it takes a person.
Four minutes an invoice: opening it, keying the supplier, date and totals into the ledger, attaching the file and filing the email. Anything over your approval limit still stops and waits for a person.
Three minutes a chase: checking who is late, writing to them, sending it and noting it went. What this saves is the chasing. Whether the client answers is still down to them.
One minute per email: opening it, working out whose client it belongs to, passing it on and marking it dealt with. This covers the general practice mailbox only, never anyone's personal inbox.
Eight minutes a day: pulling the filing dates, checking them against your own tracker and flagging anything that has moved. Catching a date that changed is worth more than eight minutes, and that part is not counted.
Twelve minutes: filling the template from the client record, checking the scope and the fee, sending it for signature, filing it and chasing it if it goes quiet. This is a manager's time rather than an administrator's, and it is priced that way.
Six minutes a day: reading down the VAT deadline list, working out who is inside the window and sending the reminders. Quarter-end weeks take longer than this and we have not claimed the difference.
Twenty-five minutes every Monday: pulling work in progress, debtors and the week's deadlines out of three systems and writing them up into something the partners will actually read.
Fifteen minutes: creating the client record, opening the folder, sending the identity and address request and logging what was asked for. The check itself is still a person's judgement, so none of that time is claimed here.
Five minutes: reading the enquiry, creating the record, writing down what they asked for and sending the acknowledgement.
Two minutes: seeing who has not filled their timesheet in and nudging them. A small one, included because leaving small ones out would quietly change the total.
Answers the mailbox outside office hours so nobody is left wondering whether their email arrived. Deliberately worth zero. Nobody was going to reply at ten at night, so no person's time is displaced. It improves what it is like to be your client; it does not give anyone an hour back, and pretending otherwise would put invented time in the total.
Switched off three weeks ago when the old portal went. Its runs were real and it genuinely saved time for the five months it existed, and none of those hours are in the total on the first screen. That is deliberate. The work it displaced no longer exists, so crediting it would mean carrying a saving forward that nobody is making any more. It is named here rather than deleted, so that the run count stepping down has a reason next to it instead of looking like a fault.
Runs every five minutes. No person would ever check a website every five minutes by hand, so no human time is displaced. Its value is detection speed, not hours. Counting it would add over seven hundred invented hours a month and drown every real figure on this page.
SAMPLE DATA for an invented practice. Three rates are in play, because the person displaced is not the same person on every job. £22 an hour is the practice administrator, £32 an hour is the bookkeeper or semi-senior, and £55 an hour is a client manager. Each is the fully loaded hourly cost of that person to the practice, not their salary and not a charge-out rate. £32 is the fallback for anything with no rate of its own. On a real client box these figures are set with the client and written down here before the box ships. This is the money figure on the first screen. The hours are the ones worked out above; the rate they are priced at is set by hand, so you can argue with that too.