Build the fully-loaded cost of your books.
Stop comparing your bookkeeper's salary. Compare their fully-loaded effective cost — wages plus payroll taxes plus healthcare plus vision plus dental plus life plus disability, divided by their productive hours (after PTO and wasted time). That's what AI assists with. Numbers update live as you adjust the inputs.
Every figure on this page is an illustrative estimate from your own inputs and industry benchmarks — not a guarantee or promise of results.
How much manual bookkeeping time happens today?
≈ 260 hrs/year of manual bookkeeping
Industry surveys (Gallup, Atlassian) put unproductive time at 25-40% (industry benchmark, illustrative). Bookkeepers specifically lose time to manual data entry (replaceable), context-switching, status reporting, and chasing missing receipts.
All bank + credit card transactions across accounts.
Base compensation. Same comp profile applied to every employee.
Everyone in the accounting function who touches the books — bookkeepers, AP/AR clerks, staff accountants. We assume the same comp profile for all; adjust per-employee comp if needed.
BLS median for US bookkeepers (2024): $25/hr; range $20-$45 depending on metro + experience (industry benchmark, illustrative).
Standard part-time = 20 hrs, full-time = 40 hrs. Annual hours = this × 52.
FICA 6.2% + Medicare 1.45% + FUTA 0.6% + SUTA varies. Typical effective: 8-10% of wages (industry benchmark, illustrative).
Days the employee is paid but not producing output.
BLS: median 10 days for FT after 1 year, 15 days after 5. PT often gets 0-5 prorated.
Median 5-7 days for FT. Many PT positions offer none, though state laws (CA, NY) are changing this.
Employer monthly contribution per employee.
KFF 2024 employer survey: single coverage $700-$900/mo employer share. Family coverage $1,400-$1,800/mo. Set $0 for PT or 1099.
Vision-only plans run $8-$25/mo employer share. Often bundled with dental.
Dental employer share averages $25-$60/mo per employee.
Typical employer-paid term life ($50K coverage) costs $8-$20/mo.
Short-term + long-term disability + supplemental (Aflac, accident, critical illness): $20-$75/mo per employee.
What you're spending or exposed to today vs ours.
Illustrative baseline if errors go uncaught until year-end: late filings, tax penalties, audit findings. PHAs: $25K+; SMBs: $1-5K (industry benchmark, illustrative).
$299 SMB, $599 mid-market, $1,299 enterprise, $1,499 compliance-heavy (PHA/federal).
= loaded cost ÷ productive hours. Per-employee — same regardless of team size. Typically 1.5–2× the base wage once benefits + lost time are factored in.
How many FTEs worth of productive capacity does AI free up?
Most customers don't reduce headcount — they keep their team and redirect freed capacity to higher-value work (advisory, forecasting, controls). The headline savings number above assumes that reallocation. The headcount-reduction number above is the alternate framing for orgs that prefer to capture the savings directly.
- • Fully-loaded cost: base wages + payroll taxes (~9% of wages) + all employer-paid insurance + supplemental.
- • Productive hours: paid hours/year − PTO hours − wasted hours. PTO at 8 hrs/day. Wasted % comes from your input.
- • Effective hourly rate: fully-loaded annual cost ÷ productive hours. This is the rate every bookkeeping hour actually costs.
- • Manual bookkeeping baseline: 60s per transaction + 5 hrs/mo reconciliation, with hours-input override for known totals.
- • AI-assisted time: 1.5s per transaction (auto-categorize, human spot-check 5%) + 0.1 hr/mo (continuous reconciliation).
- • Penalty avoidance: the model assumes 85% of baseline exposure is caught in-period rather than at year-end audit (illustrative modeling assumption, not a guarantee). Ledger Copilot computes and validates books; it does not file to HUD on your behalf.
- • Team math: comp profile applied uniformly across all employees. Team total = per-employee × headcount. Bookkeeping hours are entered as the org-wide total (across the whole team).
- • Equivalent FTE freed: hours saved ÷ productive hours per employee. Capped at total headcount.
- • Headcount reduction savings: floor(FTE freed) × fully-loaded annual cost per employee. Most orgs reallocate rather than cut — this is the alternate framing.
- • Deterministic: same inputs always produce same output. Adjust as your situation changes.
- • BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, May 2024 (bookkeeping/accounting clerks) — base wage range
- • KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey 2024 — employer healthcare contribution averages
- • SHRM Benefits Survey 2024 — vision/dental/life/disability participation + employer share
- • Gallup State of the American Workplace + Atlassian State of Teams — wasted/unproductive time estimates