What answering enquiries by hand costs. The line no set of accounts contains.

This page won't tell you what it costs you. It tells you how to count it, with your own numbers, in ten minutes, without asking anyone for a quote.

Why this cost doesn't show up anywhere

The reason is an accounting one, and a dull one, and it's also why it lasts for years. The person answering enquiries is already on the payroll. Their hours don't produce an invoice, don't have a cost centre of their own and aren't added up in any report.

A cost without a line never gets questioned, because to question it you first have to see it. It's the same mechanism that makes people underestimate the cost of paperwork in export operations: the work is there, the payment is there, and the sheet putting the two side by side is missing.

You can't cut a cost nobody has ever written down. Write it down first, then decide.

The six lines of the bill

Six lines, and the first is the only one anybody looks at. The other five almost always weigh more, and they're invisible for the same reason: none of them produces a document.

Line	Contents	How to measure it
Writing timethe visible line	The minutes spent composing the reply, once you already know what to say.	With a stopwatch, on five real replies. Estimates from memory always come out too low.
Look-up timealmost always double	Finding the right price, the latest spec sheet, what was promised to that customer last time.	Count how many times you open a file or ask a colleague before you can reply.
Redoing repliesthe line nobody owns up to	Replies sent with the wrong figure, and the second email correcting the first.	How many times last month you wrote “sorry, a correction”.
Delaypaid in lost opportunities	The hours between the enquiry arriving and the reply, while the person who wrote is weighing up other suppliers.	Time received and time answered, on twenty enquiries. The worst case matters more than the average.
Enquiries never followed upthe silent loss	The ones that got one reply and then nobody called back, because there was no list.	You only find them by looking for them. If you don't know how many there are, the number isn't zero.
Interrupting the person who decidesthe most expensive hour in the business	The owner stopped to confirm a price or approve a discount, ten times a day.	Same calculation, using the hourly cost of the person interrupted rather than the person interrupting.

The three numbers everything starts from

Three numbers, all yours. How many enquiries arrive in a month, counted on every channel, phone and messages included. How many minutes pass on average between reading an enquiry and sending a complete reply. What an hour of that person costs the business: the full employment cost, not their take-home pay.

Multiply the three and you have the monthly labour cost alone. It isn't the whole bill yet, because the last three lines of the table are missing, but it's the line to start from, and it takes ten minutes with a spreadsheet or the calculator below.

The first of the three is also the one most often missing. If you don't know how many enquiries arrived last month, that's already the most useful thing you'll learn today, and you can get it in thirty days by counting them by hand on a sheet.

Delay is a separate line

The cost of time and the cost of delay get mixed up all the time, and lumping them together makes the bill look smaller. Time is paid in hours and is proportional to the work done. Delay is paid in lost opportunities, and isn't proportional to anything.

An enquiry answered after two days can cost the whole order or nothing, depending on who else replied first. The practical difference: the first line shrinks when you work better, the second only shrinks when you reply sooner. On an enquiry from abroad the distance counts for even more, as explained in how to reply to an email from a foreign importer.

There's a third dimension too, and it only applies across borders. The study Can’t Read, Won’t Buy by CSA Research, with 8,709 respondents in 29 countries, found that 40% never buy from a website in a language other than their own. It covers consumers, not professional buyers, so it points in a direction rather than proving a result: we report it with that limit stated.

What businesses that have already done it estimate

Almost 60% estimate at least five hours a week. The 2026 Observatory by Sibill and Astraricerche, based on 500 Italian small and medium-sized businesses with turnover up to €10 million, reports that almost 60% of businesses using AI estimate they save at least 5 hours a week.

Two caveats before you use that number, and they're the same ones we'd ask of anyone showing it to us. It's an estimate reported by the businesses themselves, not a measurement by a third party. And it covers the use of artificial intelligence in general, not just the first reply. Use it as an order of magnitude to decide whether measuring your own case is worth it, never as a promise.

At the other end of the cycle there's a more solid measurement. Intrum's European Payment Report 2025, based on 9,150 executives in 25 European countries, reports that businesses lose “more than a quarter of the working year (73 working days) chasing late payments” and that 11% of revenue is collected late. It's the same family of cost on a different line: payment reminders instead of replies.

When the answer is to do nothing

Two cases, and they're real. First: if volume is low and no enquiry gets left behind, the bill is small and a system would cost more than it recovers. Ten enquiries a week handled comfortably by one person aren't a problem that needs solving.

Second: if the process changes with every enquiry and no part of it repeats, there's nothing to automate. You automate what's repetitive, not what's frequent, and the two often get confused.

People selling systems have every reason not to say this, which is exactly why it pays to do the sums before asking anyone for a quote, us included. And if the sums say otherwise, the piece that works on this line is capture and first reply, judged on a single number: average time to first reply, measured before and after. With the rule set out in Ethics: the system prepares, and a person sends.

Questions and answers