What a small business back office actually costs

Ask a small business owner what their admin costs and you will usually get one of two answers. Either a shrug, or the monthly total of their software subscriptions. Both are wrong, and they are wrong in the same direction.

The subscriptions are the visible cost. They arrive as invoices, they land on the card statement, and they are easy to add up. The hours are the invisible cost, and they are almost always the larger of the two.

Start with the visible half

Here is a fairly ordinary stack for a five-person business. These are typical UK list prices, per month:

Nobody pays for all eight. But most businesses past their first hire are paying for four or five, and the total lands somewhere between £120 and £260 a month. Call it £2,000 a year.

That is a real number, and it is the number owners tend to quote. It is also the smaller half of the problem.

Now the half nobody bills you for

The tools do not do the work. They hold the work.

Your accounting software does not reconcile anything — it presents a list of unmatched transactions and waits for you. Your CRM does not build itself — someone types the contact in after the call. Your booking tool takes bookings, but only from people who visit the page rather than picking up the phone.

Every one of those subscriptions has a person attached to it, and in a small business that person is usually the owner, working after the real work has stopped.

The arithmetic is worth doing properly, with your own numbers rather than ours:

1. Count the hours. Reconciling, chasing, quoting, filing receipts, answering the phone when nobody else can, replying to reviews, updating the diary. For most owners it lands between five and ten hours a week.
2. Pick a rate. Not minimum wage — the rate you bill at, or the rate you would pay someone competent to do it. If you bill £45 an hour, use £45.
3. Multiply. Six hours a week at £45 is £270 a week. Call it £13,000 a year, allowing for holidays.

Against £2,000 of software, that is where the money actually goes. And it is worse than the number suggests, because those hours are the ones that land at 9pm on a Sunday, after the job is done and the van is unloaded.

The admin of a small business is not hard. It is just endless. It lands after the real work, and it never compounds into anything.

The third cost, which is the worst one

There is a cost below the other two, and it does not appear in either calculation: the work that never happens.

The call that rings out at 11:40 while you are under a sink, and the customer rings the next plumber. The invoice that goes out four days late because you were on site, and gets paid three weeks later than it should have. The quote you meant to follow up and forgot. The review you never asked for.

None of that shows up on a statement. It shows up as a business that grows slower than it should, and an owner who cannot work out why they are busy and not much better off.

What to do with the number

Three honest options, and only one of them is us.

Hire someone. A part-time bookkeeper or an admin assistant is genuinely the right answer for a lot of businesses, particularly once the work is more than ten hours a week. It costs more than software and it works.

Cut the stack. If you are paying for eight tools and using four, the fastest saving available to you takes an afternoon and a cancelled direct debit. Do that before you buy anything else, including ours.

Change what the tools do. The reason the hours exist is that the software waits for you. Tools that do the work and ask you to confirm it remove the hours rather than organising them. That is the bet Bizzle is making, and you can see what that actually looks like before you take our word for it.

Whichever you pick, do the multiplication first. Five minutes with a calculator will tell you more about your admin than a year of shrugging at it.

If you want the software half without the arithmetic, the pricing page has a calculator that adds up your stack while you tick boxes. The hours are still yours to count.