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

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

Why this cost appears nowhere

The reason is accounting and banal, and it is also why it lasts for years. Whoever replies to enquiries is already on the payroll. Their hours generate no invoice, have no dedicated cost centre and aren't added up in any report.

A cost with no line is never questioned, because to question it you first have to see it. It is the same mechanism that makes the cost of documents in export operations underestimated: the work is there, the payment is there, and the sheet that puts them side by side is missing.

You don't cut a cost nobody has ever written down. First you write it, then you decide.

The six lines of the sums

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

Line	What it contains	How to measure it
Writing timethe visible line	The minutes spent composing the reply, once you already know what to write.	With a stopwatch, on five real replies. An estimate from memory is always too low.
Search timealmost always double	Finding the right price, the updated sheet, what was promised last time to that customer.	Count how many times you open a file or ask a colleague before you can reply.
Redoingthe line nobody admits	Replies sent with wrong data, and the second email correcting the first.	How many times, last month, you wrote «sorry, a correction».
Delaypaid in opportunities	The hours between the enquiry's arrival and the reply, during which whoever wrote is weighing up others.	Time of arrival and time of reply, on twenty enquiries. The average counts less than the worst case.
Enquiries never picked up againthe silent loss	Those replied to once 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, that number isn't zero.
Interrupting whoever decidesthe company's most expensive hour	The owner stopped to confirm a price or authorise a discount, ten times a day.	The same calculation, with the hourly cost of whoever is interrupted instead of whoever interrupts.

The three numbers everything starts from

Three numbers, all yours. How many enquiries arrive in a month, counted on every channel including phone and messages. How many minutes pass on average between reading an enquiry and having sent a complete reply. How much an hour of that person costs the company, that is, the cost to the company and not the take-home pay.

The product of the three is the monthly cost of labour alone. It isn't yet the whole sum, because the last three lines of the table are missing, but it is the line you start from and it takes ten minutes with a spreadsheet.

The first of the three is also the one most often missing. If you don't know how many enquiries arrived last month, that is already the most useful piece of information of the day, and it can be recovered 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 are constantly confused, and keeping them together makes you underestimate the sums. Time is paid in hours and is proportional to the work done. Delay is paid in 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 is reduced by working better, the second only by replying sooner. On a foreign enquiry the gap weighs even more, as written in how to reply to an importer's email.

Then there is a third dimension that applies only across borders. The study Can’t Read, Won’t Buy by CSA Research, of 8,709 respondents in 29 countries, measures that 40% never buy from a website in a language other than their own. It concerns end consumers and not professional buyers, so it points to a direction and not a result: we report it with that limit stated.

What companies that have already done it estimate

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

Two caveats before using that number, and they are the same we would ask of anyone showing it to us. It is an estimate declared by the companies, not a measurement by third parties. And it concerns the use of artificial intelligence in general, not the first reply alone. It serves as an order of magnitude for deciding whether it pays to measure your own case, never as a promise.

On the other side of the cycle there is a more solid measurement. Intrum's European Payment Report 2025, 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 is the same family of cost, on a different line: payment reminders instead of replies.

When these sums say to do nothing

Two cases, and they are real. First: if the volume is low and no enquiry falls behind, the sum is small and a system would cost more than it recovers. Ten enquiries a week handled without strain by one person have no problem to solve.

Second: if the process changes with every enquiry and there is no part that repeats, there is nothing to automate. You automate what is repeated, not what is frequent, and the two are often confused.

Those selling systems have an interest in not saying so, and that is exactly why the sums should be done before asking anyone for a quote, us included. If the sums then say the opposite, the piece that works on this line is capture and first reply, and it is judged on a single number: the average time to first reply, measured before and after. With the constraint written in Ethics: the system prepares, and a person sends.

Questions and answers