ROI and Business Case

[YourCompany.com] · Finance Department · Prepared by FullSpec · [Today's Date]

This document sets out the full financial case for automating the purchase approval workflow. It shows what the process costs today in staff time and delays, what changes once automation is live, and how quickly the investment pays back. All figures are drawn from your confirmed process data and FullSpec benchmarks for businesses handling approximately sixty purchase requests a month. You keep one intentional decision point; FullSpec handles everything else in the build.

01What the current process is costing you

The three highest-friction steps in your current process are the ones consuming the most time and creating the most failure risk. Each one is a direct driver of the cost figures above.

• Wait for approver response (Step 5): Average 1 to 5 business days of idle time per request. No deadline is set, no reminder is automatic, and the entire approval cycle stalls until the manager acts. This single step accounts for the majority of total turnaround time and is the primary bottleneck in the process.
• Chase approver if no response (Step 6): Approximately 5 minutes of manual effort per chase, applied inconsistently. Finance relies on memory to know which requests are overdue. When the chase is skipped, requests can go weeks without resolution and month-end reconciliation becomes a manual search through email and Slack history.
• Raise purchase order in Xero (Step 9): Approximately 10 minutes per approved request, batched at end of day. Data is re-keyed from email or Slack into Xero by hand, creating a gap between approval decision and the accounting record. Errors in supplier name, amount, or line item description are common and discovered only at invoice-matching stage.

02What changes after automation

Once the three agents are live, the automation platform handles intake validation, approver routing, 48-hour escalation, register updates, Xero PO creation, and requester notification without any manual intervention. Your finance team keeps exactly one decision point: a finance manager reviews and confirms the draft purchase order in Xero before it is sent to the supplier. That step is retained by design as a financial control, not a limitation of the build. Everything else runs the moment a Jotform submission lands.

03Before and after comparison

04Tool costs

05Net ROI summary

06Assumptions log

All figures in this document represent a central estimate for a business processing approximately sixty purchase requests per month at a $50/hour loaded staff rate. If your volume increases, the savings scale proportionally: at ninety requests per month the annual staff cost saving rises to approximately $19,500, and the payback period shortens to roughly three months. If your loaded hourly rate is higher than $50, every hour saved is worth more and the net ROI improves accordingly. Conversely, if your current volume is closer to twenty requests per month, the annual saving falls to approximately $4,300, and the payback period extends to around twelve months. FullSpec can recalculate this document using your confirmed rate and volume at any point. The tool costs and build cost remain fixed regardless of volume changes.