# How many hours a week does your team spend on work a system could carry?

Count it from three numbers you already know: how many clients, cases or accounts are live, how often each one is handled, and the minutes each handling spends finding where it was left. The page turns them into hours a week, then shows what a system would give back at your own rate. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

No price on this page.

## What a system gives back

- **Operations systems**: spent reading what came in, chasing what is waiting, and finding where each one was left. It captures each request, routes it, follows it through and keeps one record, so nobody has to go looking.
- **Growth systems**: spent researching accounts, drafting the first message and remembering who needs following up. It researches, drafts and follows up on every account, and nothing goes out past the line your company draws.
- **Product systems**: spent handling by hand the requests your product could answer itself. It handles those requests inside the product, within the limits your team sets, and every action can be traced.

## What this leaves out

- The system’s price. It is given after the mapping call, fixed and in writing.
- The weeks before the system runs, and the time your team gives the mapping.
- Work that needs judgement. It stays with your team, and the share you set should leave it there.
- Anything these three numbers do not count, in either direction: errors caught earlier, replies sent sooner, the hours a new process takes to settle.

## Why there is no price on this page

What a system costs depends on what it has to carry, which is exactly what these three numbers cannot tell anyone. A price given before the work is mapped is a guess, and the buyer pays for the guess either way.

So the order is the other way round. The mapping call sets the scope, the Consult maps the work and sets the baseline, and the price comes after it: one figure, fixed, in writing. The numbers you typed here are the right thing to bring to that call.

## What the three numbers measure

Not the work itself: the minutes before it, spent finding where each client, case or account was left. That is the part a system carries best, because it is the same every time, and the part nobody staffs for, because it hides inside every handling.

The share is yours to set. Leave the work that needs judgement with your team, and set the share to what is left. The mapping call is where that estimate gets tested against how your company actually runs.

## Related

- [Alternatives to hiring](https://octyn.co/compare/alternatives-to-hiring-for-operations)
- [Total cost of ownership](https://octyn.co/glossary/total-cost-of-ownership)
- [The Consult](https://octyn.co/consult)

Canonical: https://octyn.co/what-it-costs