How to Calculate Your Admin Tax: A 20-Minute Method for East London SMEs

Sunday afternoon, kitchen table, two pages of A4. The owner of a small East London business is finally doing the sum she’s been avoiding for three months.

Hours per week of admin across the team. Pencilled in. Rough.

Hourly cost — fully-loaded, including NI, pension, the bit she usually forgets. Pencilled in.

Multiplied by 52.

She stares at the number for about thirty seconds, puts the pen down, and makes another coffee. The number isn’t outrageous on its own. It’s outrageous next to the question she’s been quietly asking for two quarters about why margins keep narrowing despite a healthy order book.

That’s what most owners do the first time they put a £ figure on the Admin Tax. The sum is straightforward. The number is not.

What follows is how to do that sum properly. Twenty minutes, last week’s calendar, a sheet of A4, and a willingness to be surprised by your own number. What to count, what to leave out, what hourly rate to use, and how to read the result.

What you’re looking for, before you start

Before counting anything, get clear on what counts.

The Admin Tax is what your team’s week silently loses to low-judgement repetition — typing the same thing twice in three places, chasing the same email a third time, retidying the same inbox shapes that come back tomorrow, retyping a quote into someone else’s template. The shape of those tasks is what makes them count. They tend to share four markers:

• Repetitive. The same task happens every week, often more than once. Not “we sometimes write a quote” — we write twelve quotes a week and they all start from the same template.
• Low-judgement. The output doesn’t change much based on who does it, as long as that person is competent and informed. A renewal letter is a renewal letter. A site report is a site report. A booking confirmation is a booking confirmation.
• Text or sort or chase. The output is a document, a list, a logged record, a tidied inbox, or a chased email. If it’s a hands-on physical task or a real conversation, it isn’t admin in this sense.
• Trainable. A capable junior could do it after a week of shadowing. The work doesn’t depend on senior judgement.

What you’re not counting is the skilled work your team is paid for. Negotiating a tricky renewal with a difficult tenant isn’t admin. Pricing a complex renovation quote with structural surprises isn’t admin. The five minutes spent typing up the agreed terms afterwards is.

The line gets drawn at: would a well-configured assistant — human or otherwise — be able to do this without senior input? If yes, it counts.

The 20-minute method

What follows is the version you can run on yourself, this morning, with no software you don’t already have.

1. Pick one normal week (2 minutes)

Open last week’s calendar. If last week was unusually busy, quiet, or involved any one-off project, pick the week before. The point is typical, not worst.

Don’t try to recall a “representative average.” Memory smooths everything out. Pick one specific week and work from it.

2. List the team (1 minute)

Write down everyone who does any admin work in the business. For most small businesses in the property economy, this is between three and eight people. The director, the office manager, the negotiator, the operations lead, the duty manager whose admin is the rota, the project manager whose admin is RAMS and supplier chase, the cleaner whose admin is the schedule.

Don’t forget yourself. Owner-admin is often the most expensive line on this whole exercise.

3. List the recurring admin tasks per person (8 minutes)

For each person, write down the tasks they did last week that meet the four markers above. Aim for two to four tasks per person. If you list ten, you’re including skilled work — narrow it down.

Examples by sector. The trade is different. The work is identical in shape.

• Property. Material Information drafting and re-uploading. Tenancy renewal letters. AML document chasing. Reference chasing. Maintenance request triage. Section 21 paperwork. Keeping the portal listings tidy.
• Construction. Quote reformatting between client templates. RAMS for the next site, mostly copied from the last one. Supplier chase emails. Change order documentation. Snagging list write-ups. Invoice-against-quote reconciliation.
• Architecture and design. Fee proposals tailored from a largely standard scope. Specification documents and schedules of work kept in sync across revisions. Planning application paperwork. Stage reports. Drawing register updates. Client update emails that need to sound like they came from the principal.
• Hospitality. Booking confirmation admin. Compliance documentation (food hygiene, allergen records, licensing). Supplier ordering and invoicing. Rota management. OTA review responses. F&B GP% reconciliation.
• Facilities and cleaning. Schedules. Site reports. COSHH documentation. Training record updates. Compliance reminders for clients. Quote variations. The rolling inbox of “is anyone available next Tuesday.”

Different language. Same week.

4. Estimate hours per week per task (5 minutes)

For each task, write down a realistic estimate of how many hours per week it takes — across the whole team, not per person. If two people share a task, count the combined hours.

Don’t agonise over precision. ±30% is fine at this stage. If you genuinely don’t know whether tenancy renewals take three hours or six, write 4.5 and move on. The exercise is about magnitude, not accountancy.

A trick that helps: if I had to hire someone tomorrow to do only this task, how many hours a week would I be paying them for? That’s the answer.

5. Apply your fully-loaded hourly cost (2 minutes)

This is the bit most owners skip, because the salary alone feels like the right number. It isn’t.

Fully-loaded hourly cost is what the person actually costs the business, including everything that doesn’t show up as their take-home pay: salary, employer National Insurance, pension contribution, holiday pay accrual, training, software seats, a rough share of overhead. For most East London SMEs in 2026, that’s roughly 1.3 times the hourly salary, sometimes higher.

Quick reckoner for typical small businesses in the property economy:

Use the right rate for the right person. The single most distorting mistake on this exercise is applying a £25/hr blended rate to admin work being done by the £40/hr director. Senior admin is more expensive than people think.

6. Multiply (2 minutes)

For each task: hours per week × fully-loaded £/hr × 52 = annual cost of that task.

Sum the column. That’s your number.

For a typical 4-person East London letting agency, the answer is between £13,000 and £18,000. For a 5-person construction firm, £8,000 to £14,000 — fewer total hours, higher per-hour cost. For a 12-person cleaning business with one back-office person, £15,000 to £22,000 because the admin is concentrated. For a 20-room boutique hotel, often above £20,000 once compliance and bookings are properly counted.

Most small businesses come in between £8,000 and £20,000. Often higher.

What the number is actually telling you

The £ figure isn’t really the point. The point is what shows up in the working — the four or five tasks quietly eating most of the total.

In nearly every business I’ve looked at, two or three tasks account for more than half the total. That’s the lever. Fix those two or three and the annual figure drops sharply, often by 40–60%.

What kind of fix? Some of the biggest line items are AI problems — drafting, sorting, summarising, formatting, chasing. Some are process problems — the team has the tools but no agreed routine, so the work gets duplicated. A small number are decision problems wearing AI clothes — the task is repetitive because nobody has decided what the answer should be, and a tool won’t fix that until somebody does.

Sorting your list into those three categories is what turns the number into a plan. The calculator doesn’t do that bit — because it’s a conversation, not a spreadsheet. If you’d rather skip the A4 entirely and see a first-pass number now, our free AI Value Calculator gives you an instant estimate of hours reclaimed and annual savings based on team size and salary data.

What to do with the number

Once you have it, three suggestions.

Show it to one other person in the business who’d recognise the maths — your accountant, your most operationally-minded co-director, the person who actually handles the books. The shock value of the figure is most useful when shared.

Identify the three biggest line items. Don’t try to fix all of them at once. Two or three tasks usually account for the majority of the total, and the highest-leverage move is to pick the worst one.

Then ask, for each: is this a repetitive task an AI tool can do, a process my team needs to agree, or a decision I’ve been avoiding? Once you can answer that, the number on your A4 sheet stops being a problem and starts being a punch list.

If you want help walking through your numbers with someone, that’s exactly what an AI Strategy & Operations Audit is for — mapping where the time actually goes, attaching real costs, and separating the AI problems from the process problems from the decisions that have been quietly avoided.

For the line items that come out of the audit as genuinely AI-tractable — the drafting, the chasing, the reformatting, the templated work that eats senior time — that’s where a Bespoke AI & Automation Build earns its keep. A focused tool built around your actual workflow, sitting on top of the systems your team already uses, taking the repetitive 60% of a job off someone’s plate so the skilled 40% gets done properly. Most builds in this category land in the £800–£5,000 range and pay back in two to four months.

Most owners haven’t done that sum. Once you have, the rest of the conversation gets easier.