Value recovered = team size × hourly cost × reclaimed hours per month. A 20-person team at $25/hour reclaiming 20 minutes a day plus 15 minutes of weekly timesheet admin recovers about 8.3 hours per person per month — roughly $4,150 of working time. The software costs 20 × $4.99 = $99.80.
ROI Time Tracking Calculator
Put a number on what untracked time costs your team — and what tracking it gives back. Move the sliders to match your team and read the return on investment instantly, in dollars, multiples and payback days.
What is time tracking ROI?
Time tracking ROI is the return your company gets from knowing where working hours actually go. The investment side is small and known — a per-user subscription. The return side is the money currently leaking without a trace: untracked and idle time, hours booked to the wrong work, timesheets assembled by hand, and payroll built on estimates instead of records.
This employee ROI calculator makes that return concrete. It multiplies the time your team can realistically reclaim by what an hour of your team actually costs, subtracts the price of the software, and shows the net gain per month and year — plus how many working days it takes for the subscription to pay for itself.
How to calculate your time tracking ROI
Four sliders, one honest answer.
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Set your team size and the average hourly cost of one person — use the loaded cost (salary plus taxes and overhead) if you know it.
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Estimate the recoverable time per person per day: untracked, idle or misallocated minutes that visibility would reclaim. Start low — 20 minutes is conservative.
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Add the timesheet admin time automation removes, and check the per-user price — it's prefilled with WebWork's real Pro plan rate.
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Read the board: value recovered per month, the software cost, your net gain, the return multiple, and the payback period in working days.
The ROI formula behind the board
No black box — every number on this page comes from one line.
ROI = (Value recovered − Software cost) ÷ Software cost
Payback period
Payback = monthly software cost ÷ value recovered per working day. In the example above the team recovers about $190 per working day, so the $99.80 subscription pays for itself before the first day is over — everything after that is return.
Where the money actually leaks
Three drains that don't show up in any report — until time is tracked.
Untracked & idle time
Minutes between tasks, unlogged breaks, work that never lands on the right project. Individually invisible, they compound into hours per week — the largest and least visible drain.
20 min/day × 20 people ≈ $3,600/mo at $25/hManual timesheets
Filling timesheets from memory, fixing them after review, chasing the ones that never arrive. Automation turns this whole loop into a by-product of simply working.
15 min/week × 20 people ≈ $540/mo at $25/hPayroll built on estimates
When recorded hours are approximations, overtime, absences and billable time inherit the error. Accurate records close the gap between hours paid and hours worked.
1% payroll error on 20 × $25/h ≈ $870/moReading the numbers honestly
Conservative by design
The defaults assume you reclaim 20 minutes per person per day — a third of what workplace studies typically report as unaccounted time. If the result still looks too good, halve the slider and look again.
Gross value, not cash
Recovered time turns into money through more billable hours, more output, or lower overtime — depending on your business. The board shows the value of the time itself, before tax and utilization effects.
What we don't count
No made-up multipliers for morale, retention or "focus". Rollout takes a few hours we also don't bill against it. The math is deliberately simple enough to defend in front of your CFO.
See the recovery on your own team
A 30-minute walkthrough with your team size, your workflows and your questions — see exactly where WebWork finds the hours this calculator just priced.
From an estimate to a measured number
This calculator estimates; your trial measures. Run WebWork for two weeks and productivity insights shows the real figure — tracked versus idle time, where hours land, and what changed once everyone could see the numbers. Then compare it with the estimate you just made.
Try WebWork FreeExplore WebWork
The calculator prices the problem — these are the features that recover the hours.
Time tracking
Automatic, accurate tracking of every working hour — the visibility all the recovered value starts from.
Track timeProductivity insights
Tracked vs idle time, app and website usage, productivity trends — the report that shows your real recovery.
See insightsActivity monitoring
Daily activity levels per person and project, so misallocated hours have nowhere to hide.
Monitor activityPayroll hours tracker
Payroll built on recorded hours instead of estimates — the third leak, closed.
Fix payrollFrequently asked questions
A tool that compares what time tracking software costs against the value of the time it recovers. You enter team size, average hourly cost and the time you expect to reclaim; it returns the monthly value recovered, the net gain after the subscription price, the return multiple and the payback period.
ROI = (value recovered − software cost) ÷ software cost. Value recovered is team size × hourly cost × reclaimed hours per month. For a 20-person team at $25/hour reclaiming 20 minutes a day, that's roughly $4,150 recovered against about $100 of software — a return of more than 40×.
Workplace studies consistently find 60+ minutes of unaccounted time per person per day between idle gaps, context switching and misallocated work. This calculator defaults to 20 minutes — a deliberately conservative third — and lets you set any value, down to 10 minutes, where the ROI usually still clears 20×.
Because the two sides are wildly mismatched: an hour of employee time costs $15–$150, while the software costs a few dollars per user per month. Even tiny time recoveries outweigh the subscription. That's also why the methodology section shows every assumption — halve the sliders and the conclusion doesn't change.
It's the same return viewed per person: the value one employee's reclaimed time generates versus their per-seat cost. At $25/hour and 20 reclaimed minutes a day, one person returns about $180 net per month on a $4.99 seat — which is why the ROI barely depends on team size.
The multiple stays the same at any size — 3 people leak proportionally as much as 300. What changes is the absolute number: a 5-person team at $30/hour reclaiming 20 minutes a day nets about $1,500 a month. For agencies billing by the hour, the recovered time is often directly billable.
The Pro plan is $4.99 per user per month, or $3.99 billed annually; higher plans add payroll, invoicing and enterprise features. The calculator prefills the monthly Pro rate — edit the price field to model any plan or competitor.
Divide the monthly subscription by the value recovered per working day. With the default assumptions the software pays for itself within the first working day of the month — the payback line on the board recalculates this live from your own inputs.
Transparency matters more than tracking itself. Teams that announce what is tracked and why, share the reports, and use them for workload balancing rather than surveillance typically see engagement rise — recovered time comes from removing friction and invisible overwork, not from pressure.
Run a two-week baseline, then compare: tracked vs idle time, hours landing on the right projects, timesheet admin time, and payroll corrections. WebWork's productivity reports give you all four numbers — put the measured recovery next to this calculator's estimate and you have your real, defensible ROI.