Most “free business calculators” online work the same way: you answer a few questions, a number appears, and you have no idea where it came from. That’s a reasonable thing to be suspicious of — a number with no visible math behind it is just a guess wearing a UI. We built our free Operations Diagnostic the opposite way, and this post is the part most tools never publish: the actual formulas.

Two separate jobs, kept strictly apart

The diagnostic does two things, and we never let them blur into each other. One part is a deterministic engine: plain arithmetic over the numbers you enter, the same every time, for every business. The other part is a short written summary generated by an AI model. The AI is told, explicitly, that it is never allowed to invent or adjust a number — it only writes prose around figures that have already been computed. If you ever see a euro figure in your report, it came from the formulas below, not from a language model guessing.

The Operations Maturity Score: four weighted categories out of 100

Your score is the sum of four sub-scores, each capped at its own point budget:

  • Process Automation (30 points) — driven by your primary system (paper and Access score low, a real cloud system scores near the maximum), how often data gets re-entered across systems, how many manual minutes go into each order, and how many people touch a single order.
  • Data & Visibility (25 points) — whether you have a live, real-time view of orders and stock without phoning someone, and how you currently track inventory or shipment status.
  • Resilience & Risk (20 points) — how often a single person or computer being unavailable stops a key process, and whether you’ve lost a client in the last 12 months to a process or data problem.
  • Growth Readiness (25 points) — whether your current system is seen as a bottleneck to growth, and how many hours per week the owner or manager spends on admin a system should be handling.

Each answer maps to a fixed point value from a lookup table — there’s no hidden weighting or “AI judgment” involved in scoring. A paper-based process scores a 0 on that question; a real-time cloud system scores near the maximum. The four totals are added together for the 0–100 score, and that score is matched against five bands (Critical, At Risk, Developing, Solid, Optimized), each with a fixed score range.

The cost engine: where the euro figures come from

This is the part we get asked about most, so here it is in full.

Loaded hourly labor cost. We start from the gross monthly salary you enter, add a 1.3× multiplier to account for employer-side overhead (social contributions, etc.), annualize it, and divide by 2,080 (52 weeks × 40 hours) to get a euro-per-hour figure. Every other labor-based calculation below uses this rate.

Processing waste. Your daily order volume is annualized at 250 working days a year. We multiply that by a representative number of minutes per order (drawn from the band you selected — under 5, 5–15, 15–30, or over 30 minutes) and by a re-entry multiplier (1.0× if data is rarely re-entered across systems, 1.6× if sometimes, 2.4× if always), then convert to hours and apply your loaded hourly rate.

Error correction cost. Your annual order volume is multiplied by a representative error rate drawn from the band you selected (under 1%, 1–3%, 3–10%, or over 10%), then by a flat 0.75 hours assumed per correction, then by your loaded hourly rate.

Owner time cost. The hours per week you report spending on admin a system should handle, multiplied by 52 weeks, at a flat conservative rate of €65/hour — independent of your own salary, since this represents opportunity cost, not payroll.

Revenue risk (stockouts or missed pickup windows). Only included if you reported this happens “Frequently” or “Sometimes.” We take 2.5% of the annual revenue you entered, based on industry benchmarks suggesting 2–3% of revenue is typically lost to this kind of failure.

Add those four figures together and that’s your total annual operational waste — the headline number in your report.

Why the recovery estimate is deliberately conservative

We don’t claim modernizing your operation recovers 100% of that waste — that would be dishonest, since some inefficiency is unavoidable in any real business. Instead we apply a separate, lower recovery rate to each driver: 70% of processing waste, 80% of error cost, 60% of owner time, and 50% of revenue risk. These rates are explicitly labeled as conservative estimates based on typical implementations, not guarantees. The payback estimate then divides a flat assumed project cost of €15,000 by your annual recovery figure.

You can check our work

Every one of these constants — the 1.3× overhead multiplier, the 250 working days, the €65/hour owner rate, the 70/80/60/50% recovery rates — is listed in plain language in the “Show your assumptions” section of your own report. Nothing is hidden behind a black box, and if one of our assumptions doesn’t match your business, that’s exactly the kind of thing a real conversation with us is for.

If you want to see this engine run against your own numbers, the Operations Diagnostic is free, takes about 10 minutes, and the score and cost breakdown above are exactly what you’ll get.