There’s a point many trade businesses reach somewhere between fifteen and forty staff. The work is there. The crews are busy. The business is growing. But the office is struggling to keep up.

Before long, every conversation about growth starts turning into the same question: do we need to hire another person to handle the admin?

We built our calculator for exactly that moment.

It asks four questions, takes under a minute, and gives you an estimate of the admin and coordination load your team is carrying every week — along with how much of that time could realistically be handed back.

Most Businesses Don’t Actually Know Their Admin Number

Ask a business owner how many hours a week are going into admin and you’ll probably get a rough guess.

Ask the office manager and you might get a number they’re almost embarrassed to say out loud.

Neither is being vague on purpose. Admin rarely arrives as one obvious block of work. It shows up as four minutes here, ten minutes there, forty times throughout the day.

A quick phone call to check where a job is up to. Following up a quote. Moving a booking. Finding a work order. Chasing information from someone on site. Updating a customer. Fixing something that wasn’t entered correctly the first time.

Individually, none of it looks like much. Across an entire week, it adds up quickly.

The research backs that up. Xero's Small Business Insights has Australian small business owners at around 10.5 hours a week on admin, and time-tracking studies consistently find people underestimate their own load by a third or more. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry found 39% of small businesses spend more than six hours a week on red tape alone — before you count quoting, scheduling, chasing and invoicing.

And the workload is getting heavier.

Payday Super started on 1 July 2026, so super now goes out with every pay run instead of quarterly. For a weekly payroll, that's a quarterly job becoming a weekly one.

For a busy trade business, it becomes another task added to an office that may already be operating close to capacity.

What the Calculator Actually Shows You

We deliberately kept the calculator simple.

It asks four questions:

• How many people are in the business?

• How many of those people work in the office?

• How does your team find out where a job is up to?

• Roughly how many jobs do you run in a week?

From those answers, the calculator estimates the hours your business is carrying each week and the share of that workload we believe is genuinely recoverable.

Rather than leaving you with one big number, we translate that recovered time into something more useful — days a week, or a share of a person — and show where those hours are actually going.

Then comes the comparison, which is often the part that makes the result click.

We show what a business your size can look like when it is already running efficiently, then break the difference down across your team.

“You’re carrying 75 hours” can feel abstract.

“Two and a half hours each, every week” is something people recognise from their own Thursday afternoon.

Why We Deliberately Count Less Than the Research Does

A lot of calculators are designed to produce the biggest number possible.

Ours isn’t.

We would rather give a business a figure it can defend than a dramatic result nobody actually believes. A number you don’t trust is worse than having no number at all.

That is why we cap the office admin load at 9.4 hours per person per week — the top of the credible research range, used as a ceiling rather than a starting point.

No combination of answers pushes you above it.

We also taper the result for larger businesses, scaling back by up to 30% as you approach 100 staff, because bigger operations generally already have more process in place.

Most importantly, of the total workload we calculate, we only ever count 35% as recoverable in year one.

Not most of it.

Just over a third.

That is intentional. The rest includes judgement, client relationships, conversations and decisions that shouldn’t be automated — and realistically won’t be.

Take a thirty-person business with four people in the office, running a mixed job load and tracking work by ringing someone.

That business comes out at about 75 hours a week carried and 26 recoverable — 3.4 days a week.

We see that as a conservative floor, not a sales pitch, and a number we would be comfortable having quoted back to us in a year.

We Measure Hours, Not Headcount

We don’t calculate “roles saved”, and we never will.

The output is about hours recovered and capacity to grow into.

Given where the Australian trades workforce sits right now, that is a much more useful way to look at the problem.

The industry employed a record 1.37 million people in February 2026 and still couldn't fill 21,600 vacancies. Thirteen of fifteen core housing trades remain in national shortage, and Master Builders Australia puts the gap at another 130,000 workers just to hit housing targets by 2029.

For many growing trade businesses, simply hiring more people every time capacity gets tight is becoming harder.

If you can’t hire your way out of the problem, the next place to look is what your existing team is spending its week doing.

One plumbing business we work with got 15 hours a week back — not by cutting anyone, but by handing the work-order chaos to agents so their office manager could get back to the work only she can do.

That is the point.

The goal isn’t fewer people. It’s making sure good people aren’t spending large parts of their week doing work that doesn’t actually need them.

Where Should You Start?

Run the calculator.

It takes about forty seconds and you don’t have to talk to anyone.

Then do the step most businesses skip: show the result to your office manager and ask whether it feels low.

It usually does.

That conversation can be more valuable than the number itself, because it is often the first time a team has talked about its admin load in numbers rather than adjectives.

Instead of saying the office is “flat out”, “under the pump” or “too busy”, you finally have something measurable to work from.

Every figure the calculator produces is an estimate based on your four answers.

But it gives you a number you can question, challenge and compare with what is actually happening inside the business.

For most growing trade businesses, that is already a much better place to start than automatically assuming the next solution is another admin hire.