FM time savings calculator
Engineers spend a surprising amount of the week looking things up in O&M manuals, drawings and certificates. This works out roughly what that costs, and what it would be worth to make it faster.
Every assumption is editable, and the arithmetic is simple enough to check by hand. Nothing is sent anywhere — the calculation runs in your browser.
Your assumptions
Engineers, supervisors, anyone who searches the documents.
Fully loaded — salary, on-costs and overhead, not just take-home.
Across the whole team, not per person.
From needing the answer to having it — including finding the right file.
Ask the question, read the cited answer, check the source.
That is 10 lookups per person per week — about 2.0 a working day.
Estimated saving
230 hours of engineer time — 5 hours a week.
Estimate, based on the assumptions you entered — not measured customer data.
5 hours
£958
15 min
For context
On these numbers your team currently spends 306.7 hours a year looking things up in documents, across 46 working weeks.
How this is calculated
These figures are estimates calculated from the assumptions you enter above. They are not measured customer data, and we do not track how long document lookups take our customers. The defaults are a plausible starting point for a small in-house team, not an average or a typical result — change them to match your own operation. The arithmetic is deliberately simple so you can check it: minutes saved per lookup, times lookups per week, times 46 working weeks, times your hourly rate.
About these numbers
- Where do the default numbers come from?
- They are assumptions, not measurements: 2 people, £50 an hour fully loaded, 20 lookups a week across the team, 20 minutes each, falling to 5 with PM Assist. They are a plausible starting point for a small in-house team, chosen to be conservative rather than flattering. We do not track how long lookups take our customers, so we cannot offer an average — change every field to match your own operation.
- Why 46 working weeks rather than 52?
- 46 weeks allows for annual leave and bank holidays. Using 52 would inflate every figure on this page by about 13 percent for no reason other than to make the result look better.
- Does the number of people multiply the saving?
- No. Lookups per week is already a team-wide total, so adding people does not by itself increase the saving. The headcount is there to help you sanity-check the lookup volume — the calculator shows the per-person figure underneath, because four lookups a day reads very differently from twenty a week.
- What counts as a lookup?
- Any time someone needs a fact that lives in the building documents — a filter grade, a setpoint, an inspection date, a part number, a valve location — and has to go and find it. The time is from needing the answer to having it, which includes working out which document to open.
- Is this a guarantee of savings?
- No. It is arithmetic on the assumptions you enter. Whether your own lookups drop to five minutes depends on your documents, how they are organised, and what you ask. The free plan exists so you can find out with your own files before paying anything.
Methodology
These figures are estimates calculated from the assumptions you enter above. They are not measured customer data, and we do not track how long document lookups take our customers. The defaults are a plausible starting point for a small in-house team, not an average or a typical result — change them to match your own operation. The arithmetic is deliberately simple so you can check it: minutes saved per lookup, times lookups per week, times 46 working weeks, times your hourly rate.
The figure quoted on our pricing page — around 230 hours a year — is this same calculation run on the default assumptions above. It comes from the same code, so the two cannot disagree.