Free tool

Field Service Savings Calculator

Estimate the annual savings, payback period, and productivity gain from moving your field service business onto a modern platform. Live results, no sign-up required.

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How we calculate this

The calculator does three things, in order. First, it works out how much you spend each month on admin time — for both your field engineers and your office team — by multiplying the hours they spend on timesheets, paperwork runs, and chasing each other by their fully-loaded hourly cost (pay plus vehicle plus insurance for engineers; pay plus overheads for office staff). Then it subtracts the per-user monthly software cost across the whole team. The difference is your net monthly saving, which we multiply by twelve to give an annual figure.

The payback view takes the same monthly net saving and divides your one-time setup cost by it, giving the number of months it takes to recoup what you spend on onboarding, data migration, and training. The productivity view goes a different way: instead of asking what admin time costs, it asks how much of that admin time disappears (the default is fifty percent) and translates the recovered hours into full-time equivalents on a 1,920-hour planning year — that's a forty-hour week across forty-eight working weeks, which is the standard planning figure for UK service businesses.

The maths is deterministic and runs entirely in your browser. None of your numbers are sent to a server. The same pricing assumptions we use here apply to your real Field Forge subscription.

In a sentence: Annual ROI = (monthly admin hours × hourly cost) − (per-user software cost × team size), multiplied by twelve.

What can field service software actually save you?

The savings stack up across three areas. Each of the headings below is roughly where the calculator is pulling its numbers from.

Field engineers — fewer paperwork detours

Engineers typically lose between eight and fifteen hours a month to admin: filling in timesheets at the kitchen table after dinner, driving back to the office to drop off job sheets, ringing the dispatcher to confirm the next address. A capable engineer mobile app turns each of those into a thirty-second tap on a phone. At a fully-loaded engineer cost of around £35 an hour, eight hours a month is £280 an engineer — over a year, that's £3,360 per head, and it compounds across the whole crew.

Office team — fewer hand-rolls and chase calls

Office staff lose even more — the figure most teams settle on after they audit themselves is twelve to twenty hours a month on data entry, ringing engineers to find out where they are, and re-typing details from photographs of job sheets. Modern quoting and scheduling tools take most of that out — quotes that build themselves from a plain-English description, schedules that update live as engineers move between sites, invoices that draft themselves the moment a visit is closed. The result is fewer phone calls and a much shorter month-end.

Business overall — faster cash and fewer dropped jobs

The labour-cost saving is the easy bit to model — it's what the calculator shows. The harder bit to capture is the second-order win: quotes go out the same day, customers accept while they still remember the conversation, invoices land the day the visit ends, and engineers don't double-book. Plenty of teams find that their pipeline grows before their headcount does. See our plans for what the per-user cost actually looks like for a team your size.

Calculator assumptions

The number above is a directional ceiling, not a forecast. Specifically, we assume:

A productive year is 1,920 hours (40 hours × 48 working weeks, allowing for paid time off and bank holidays). The contractual maximum of 2,080 hours overstates real capacity, so we use the planning figure instead.
Admin time saved is fully replaced by productive work. In practice, expect to capture 60–80% of the upper bound in year one as habits change.
The currency selector controls the display symbol only. There is no live FX conversion — a US visitor entering USD inputs gets USD outputs, and vice versa.
No data leaves your browser. The maths runs entirely client-side; we do not log inputs or send them to a server.

Frequently asked questions

How much can field service management software save my business?

For a 5-engineer / 3-office team paying typical UK labour rates, the calculator shows around £25,000 in annual labour savings — that's admin time taken off engineers and office staff. Larger teams or higher hourly rates scale linearly. The exact figure depends on how much time your team currently spends on timesheets, paperwork runs, and chasing engineers — enter your real numbers above for your figure.

How do I calculate ROI for field service software?

Multiply your team's admin hours by their hourly cost to get monthly labour waste. Subtract the software's monthly cost. Multiply by 12 for annual saving. The calculator above does this automatically for engineers and office staff, then adds them together.

What is the payback period for field service software?

Payback is the one-time setup cost divided by the monthly net benefit. For most field service teams with £500 setup costs and £25k+ annual labour savings, payback lands well under a month. Use the "Payback Period" tab to see your figure.

Is field service software worth it for small teams?

The break-even point is usually 3-5 field engineers — below that, the software cost can exceed the labour savings. The "Payback Period" tab will tell you immediately if you're net-negative for your team size.

How much time does field service software save engineers per week?

Industry data suggests engineers spend 8-15 hours per month on admin (timesheets, paperwork runs, calls to the office). Field service software typically eliminates 50-90% of that. The "Productivity" tab translates this into FTE-equivalents — i.e. how many full-time roles you reclaim.

How accurate is this calculator?

The calculator assumes admin time is fully eliminated and that the labour-hours saved are real productive capacity. In practice, expect to capture 60-80% of the upper bound in year one as habits change. Treat the result as a directional ceiling, not a forecast.

What's a realistic admin-time reduction with field service software?

Most teams that adopt a modern field service platform see 50-70% reduction in admin time within 90 days. The "Productivity" calculator defaults to 50% as a conservative starting point — adjust the slider for your reality.

How much does field service software cost?

Typical pricing is £15-£40 per user per month for SMB and mid-market platforms. Setup costs (data migration, training) range £0-£2,000 depending on team size and complexity. The calculator defaults to £25/user/month and £500 setup, which are sensible mid-market starting points.

Used by contractors and field service teams

Real teams across the trades are running their operations on Field Forge today.

“Field Forge has taken us off spreadsheets and manual processes onto a fully integrated system. It organises our teams and trades, consolidates all our costing, workflow, billing, and purchase orders in one place.”

Jonathan L. — Director, Verified G2 Review

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