AI Time Savings Calculator for small business
How many hours a week could AI tools realistically take off your plate? Tick the tasks you do every week and set roughly how long they take. You'll get a careful estimate and a few ideas for where to start. Everything you enter stays in your browser.
Where to start
The tasks with the most potential, each with free prompts you can copy straight away.
Want to go deeper?
The e-books that match your answers best.
How we calculate, and why the numbers are careful
The formula
- For every task you tick, we multiply your hours by a time saving in percent. Each task has a careful range, shown in the table.
- The lower number assumes you're just starting and still check everything twice. The higher number assumes you've used AI for a few weeks and have your own templates and prompts.
- One month counts as 4.33 weeks. A working day counts as 8 hours.
- We round to half hours, because anything more precise would be pretend precision.
The time you need to read, check and fix what the AI gives you is already included in these ranges. You should always check it, especially anything with numbers, names or legal content.
What studies found
- In a controlled experiment with 453 professionals, people with ChatGPT finished short writing tasks 40% faster, and the quality was rated 18% higher. Noy & Zhang (2023), Science, summary by MIT News.
- Customer support agents with an AI assistant solved on average 14% more cases per hour. For new and less experienced agents it was 34%. Brynjolfsson, Li & Raymond, “Generative AI at Work”, NBER Working Paper 31161.
- In a US survey, workers who used generative AI said it saved them on average 5.4% of their working hours, about 2.2 hours in a 40-hour week. Bick, Blandin & Deming, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 27 Feb 2025.
We stay below the 40% on purpose. The tasks in that experiment were short and clearly described, and real work is messier. The survey is a good reality check: two hours a week is already a lot of time over a year.
| Task | Careful | With practice |
|---|---|---|
| Emails and client messages | 15% | 30% |
| Quotes and offers | 15% | 30% |
| Invoices and payment reminders | 10% | 25% |
| Social media posts | 20% | 35% |
| Answering customer questions | 15% | 30% |
| Scheduling and appointments | 10% | 25% |
| Bookkeeping prep | 10% | 20% |
| Content writing | 20% | 35% |
| Research | 15% | 30% |
| Finding and contacting new clients | 10% | 25% |
| Meeting notes and to-do lists | 20% | 35% |
| Copying data between tools | 15% | 30% |
Questions about the calculator
Is the calculator really free?
Yes. No account, no email, no catch. It's part of SoloAutomat because we'd rather show you what's possible than just tell you.
Where are my answers stored?
Only in your own browser on this device (in what's called local storage), so they're still there when you come back. Nothing is sent to us or anyone else. If you clear your browser data or use a private window, your answers are gone. The “Start over” button deletes them too.
Why do I get a range and not one number?
Because nobody knows your work as well as you do. The lower number is what you can expect at the start, the higher one after a few weeks of practice. If you're unsure, plan with the lower number.
Will I really save that much time?
Maybe, maybe not. It's an estimate, not a promise. Time saved only shows up if you actually change how you work, for example by using templates and good prompts every time instead of starting from scratch.
Which AI tool do I need for this?
A free version of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Microsoft Copilot is enough to start. For scheduling and copying data between tools you'll also want a booking tool or an automation tool like Make, Zapier or n8n. Book 1 compares tools at three budget levels.
48 ChatGPT prompts for small business
Client emails, quotes, social media, customer service, admin and automation. Copy, fill in the brackets, done.
Open the prompt library →
10 AI Prompts That Save You Time
Ten copy-and-paste prompts for the small jobs that eat your week: sorting email, answering inquiries, quotes, follow-ups, meeting notes and friendly payment reminders. A weekly time log shows you what AI really saves you. 12 pages, English and German. It's free. Payhip only asks for your email address so it can send you the download.