Ask six people in a small firm how they spend their week and none of them will mention this. Not because they're hiding it. Because two hours doesn't feel like anything worth mentioning.
Two hours is a slow Tuesday morning. Re-keying figures out of one system into another because the two don't talk. Chasing the same client for the same document for the third time. Rebuilding a spreadsheet because last month's copy had a stale tab and nobody trusted it. Each of those is a shrug at the time. On its own, none of them is a problem.
Then you add them up, and someone has to defend the answer.
What an hour actually costs
Start with pay. The ABS put full-time adult average weekly ordinary time earnings at $2,083.70 in May 2026. Ordinary hours under the National Employment Standards are capped at 38 a week. That gives you $54.83 an hour before on-costs.
Super is 12%. So the loaded rate is $61.41. (Since 1 July 2026 the ATO calculates it on qualifying earnings rather than OTE alone, which can push it slightly higher depending on what you pay.)
Payroll tax is the one people expect to add here, and for a six-person firm in South Australia it usually doesn't apply. RevenueSA's threshold is $1.5 million of Australia-wide wages. Six salaries won't reach it. If you're larger, or grouped, add it.
How many weeks there actually are
52 is the wrong number. A full-time employee gets four weeks of paid annual leave and up to 10 days of paid personal/carer's leave under the NES. In South Australia in 2026, nine public holidays land on a weekday.
260 weekdays, minus 20, minus 10, minus 9. That's 221 days. 44.2 weeks at the desk.
The number
2 hours x 44.2 weeks x 6 people = 530 hours a year.
530 hours at $61.41 is $32,574.
Move the wage input and the answer moves with it. On the South Australian average of $1,970.20 a week it comes to $30,800. On the professional, scientific and technical services average of $2,389.60, it's $37,356.
There's a second way to say it that tends to land harder in a partners' meeting. A full-time year at 38 hours across 44.2 weeks is 1,680 hours. 530 is 32% of that. Six people are collectively spending about a third of a full-time position on work nobody owns and nobody budgeted for.
Why it never shows up
The reason is the split. If one person spent 12 hours a week on this you'd have noticed inside a fortnight. Split six ways, it sits under everybody's threshold for what counts as worth raising.
The accounting reinforces it. Wages hit the P&L as one line. Timesheets round to six or fifteen minutes and get coded to a client or a job, and there is no job code for the CSV thing. Management reports have rows for revenue per partner, WIP, debtors. None for re-keying.
So it surfaces indirectly instead. Margin a bit thinner than the model said. Turnaround a day longer than you quote. Someone in the office at 7pm in the last week of the month, every month, and everyone has stopped commenting on it.
One caveat, and it cuts the wrong way. "About two hours" is self-reported and retrospective, which makes it an estimate of a thing nobody was measuring. I'd treat it as the floor of the range rather than the middle.
Your version of the number
$32,574 is my inputs, not yours. Your rates are different, your headcount is different, and your two hours might turn out to be forty minutes, or five.
The calculator below runs the same arithmetic on your own figures: your headcount, your loaded hourly rate, your working weeks. It takes about a minute and gives you a number you can put in front of someone.
Work out your own manual process cost →
Sources
- ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026 (released 13 August 2026)
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Introduction to the National Employment Standards
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Annual leave
- Fair Work Ombudsman, 2026 public holidays
- ATO, Maximum contributions base (super guarantee rate, 2026-27)
- RevenueSA, Payroll tax rates and thresholds
