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Document management ROI calculator
This calculator models the cost of your current process rather than promising a saving. You enter headcount, how long a document search takes, how often it fails, and what you spend on print and physical storage; it returns annual cost and the assumptions behind every figure.
Cost calculator
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How each figure is calculated
| Component | Calculation | Hours per year | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Searching | 50 people × 6 searches × 4 min × 225 days ÷ 60 | 4,500 | $157,500 |
| Failed searches | 15% of searches × 12 extra min ÷ 60 | 2,025 | $70,875 |
| Audit preparation | 15 person-days × 7.5 productive hours | 113 | $3,938 |
| Print, storage, archive | Entered directly | — | $8,000 |
| Total | Hours × $35 per hour, plus physical costs | 6,638 | $240,313 |
Risk costs are excluded deliberately — a superseded version reaching a customer, a record that cannot be produced for a regulator, a fine, a lost claim. They are real and often larger than everything above, but assigning them a probability would be inventing a number. Treat the total as a floor.
FAQ
About this model
Why does this not show a saving?
Because we cannot honestly calculate one. A saving depends on how much of the current cost your implementation actually removes, which varies enormously by organisation and by how well the taxonomy is designed. What we can model is what the current process costs, from your own numbers — and that figure is what a business case needs.
Where do the default values come from?
They are conservative starting points, not research findings, and we would rather say so than dress them up. Every one is editable and the arithmetic is printed below the results, so you can replace our assumptions with your own and see exactly what changed.
Is search time really the biggest cost?
Usually, because it is continuous rather than episodic. Four minutes, six times a day, across fifty people, is around 1,100 hours a year before any search fails. Audit preparation feels more expensive because it arrives in a block, but it is generally the smaller number.
How should I present this to finance?
Share the URL — every input is in the query string, so a colleague opens the same figures and can challenge any of them. An assumption someone can argue with is more useful in a business case than a headline they cannot verify.
What is not included?
Risk costs, which are real and hard to quantify: a superseded version reaching a customer, a record that cannot be produced for a regulator, a fine, a lost claim. We have left them out rather than assign a probability we cannot defend, so treat the total as a floor.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-01. Next: what DocumentMS costs or the RFP checklist.