ROI calculator
Stocktaking ROI calculator, with the method attached.
Put in your pallet locations, your count frequency and your loaded labour cost. It returns your current annual stocktaking cost, the Sentispec cost, the annual saving and the payback in months. Nothing is gated and nothing is emailed anywhere.
No form, no email, no call first. If the payback on your own numbers is poor, the calculator says so.
The calculator
Your numbers, not ours.
Every field is editable and every result updates as you type. The calculation runs in your browser, so no figure you enter leaves this page.
Read out
- Site tier One warehouse, so €9,950 setup and €39,550 per year.
- Setup, one off: €9,950
- First year total, Sentispec: €60,100
- Your inputs imply 125 pallet locations counted per hour. A hand scanner reads 50 to 100 occupied pallets an hour, about 60 to 125 locations an hour at normal occupancy, so this is a plausible count profile.
If the saving comes out negative, that is a real answer. A small site that counts twice a year, carries little inaccuracy cost and never stops a line may not clear €39,550 on labour alone. See what a manual stocktake actually costs for the cost lines most sites forget to enter.
Method
The formulas, line by line.
Five lines of arithmetic. If you disagree with an assumption, change the input and the whole chain moves with it.
- Person hours per count. People per count, multiplied by days per count, multiplied by an eight hour day. Twelve people over four days is 384 person hours.
- Current annual stocktaking cost. Person hours per count, multiplied by counts per year, multiplied by your loaded hourly cost, multiplied by the number of sites. Then the annual cost of inaccuracy is added on top, once, because you enter it for the whole operation rather than per site.
- Sentispec annual cost. The annual fee for the tier, multiplied by the number of sites, plus the counting labour that remains, plus the inaccuracy cost that remains. Residual counting labour is one person for twelve hours per count, per site, at your own hourly rate. Residual inaccuracy is 10% of what you entered.
- Annual saving. Current annual stocktaking cost minus Sentispec annual cost. The annual fee is already inside the Sentispec figure, so the saving is net of what you pay us.
- Payback in months. The total setup fee, divided by one twelfth of the annual saving. Setup is charged once per site, so a five site rollout pays €44,750 of setup rather than €8,950.
Tier selection follows the published price list. Below five warehouses the calculator uses the Site tier at €9,950 setup and €39,550 per year. At five or more it switches to Network at €8,950 setup and €37,450 per year, per site. At ten or more across borders the real answer is Enterprise, with custom terms and a rollout schedule, so treat the Network figures as an indication and nothing more.
Assumptions
Four fixed assumptions, and where each one comes from.
| Assumption | Value used | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Working day | 8 hours | A standard shift. If your counts run over a weekend on twelve hour shifts, raise the days per count input instead. |
| Residual counting labour | 1 person, 12 hours per count | Sentispec sites go from 3 to 10 people over 2 to 3 days to 1 person in 8 to 12 hours. We use the slow end of that range, 12 hours, so the saving is understated rather than flattered. |
| Residual cost of inaccuracy | 10% of what you enter | Sentispec's cost model puts the lost pallet search at €100,000 to €200,000 a year before and €10,000 to €20,000 after, which is a 90% reduction at both ends of the range. |
| Loaded labour cost default | €25 per hour | The Sentispec house figure for a Northern European warehouse operative, fully loaded. It includes employer costs, agency premium and supervision rather than the base wage. It is still the field you should change first, because a German or Danish site with heavy agency cover will run above it and a Polish site below it. |
Why the count labour figure looks low next to €50,000. Sentispec's cost model puts audit related labour at €50,000 a year for a medium warehouse of 30,000 m². This calculator will usually return less than that from the same site, because it only counts the people on the floor for the days you told it about. The €50,000 also carries supervision, reconciliation, the recount, the overtime and the administration around the count. If you want the full picture rather than the floor labour, put the difference into the cost of inaccuracy field.
Worked examples
Three sites, three answers.
Same method and the same four fixed assumptions, three warehouse sizes. Every line of each one is below, so you can see which input moves the answer.
| Line | Small: 10,000 locations | Medium: 30,000 locations | Large: 60,000 locations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full counts per year | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| People per count | 4 | 10 | 20 |
| Days per count | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Person hours per count | 96 | 240 | 480 |
| Implied pallet locations per hour | 104 | 125 | 125 |
| Count labour, per year | €9,600 | €12,000 | €24,000 |
| Cost of inaccuracy entered | €33,000 | €100,000 | €200,000 |
| Current annual stocktaking cost | €42,600 | €112,000 | €224,000 |
| Sentispec annual cost | €44,050 | €50,150 | €60,150 |
| Annual saving | -€1,450 | €61,850 | €163,850 |
| Payback on the €9,950 setup | No payback | 1.9 months | 0.7 months |
Small site, 10,000 pallet locations
Four people, three days, four times a year, and €33,000 a year of inaccuracy cost. The saving is minus €1,450, so the setup fee never comes back on these inputs. The table shows why: €9,600 of count labour and €33,000 of inaccuracy cost together do not clear the €39,550 annual fee. A site with this profile should wait, or start by measuring the cost lines it has not yet put a number on.
Two live sites show what changes that. Cuxhaven in Germany has 5,000 pallet locations, half the size of this example, and broke even in one month: it is a manufacturing site, where a production stop costs €7,000 a minute. Geel in Belgium has 7,000 locations and took six months or more. Size is not what decides it. What the count is protecting is.
Medium site, 30,000 pallet locations
Two wall to wall counts a year, ten people for three days each, and €100,000 of annual inaccuracy cost. Current cost €112,000, Sentispec cost €50,150, saving €61,850 a year, setup recovered in about eight weeks. This is the shape of most enquiries we receive, and it lands inside the one to six month break even range measured across the ten live deployments.
Large site, 60,000 pallet locations
Twenty people for three days, twice a year, is 960 person hours of counting before anyone reconciles anything. At €25 an hour that is €24,000 of pure count labour, and the €200,000 of inaccuracy cost is by far the larger half of the problem. The saving is €163,850 a year and the setup fee is recovered inside the first month. Mechelen in Belgium, at 65,000 pallet locations, broke even in three months in practice.
At this size the question usually stops being whether it pays and becomes how many sites go first. Five or more moves you to the Network tier at €37,450 per site. The three warehouse hub in Eindhoven is the closest published comparison: two annual wall to wall scans of 90,000 pallets, 3,600 or more manual hours cut to 80 or more, and around two full time roles released a year.
Limits
What this calculator leaves out on purpose.
Three real sources of value are missing from every number above, because none of them can be derived from six input fields.
- Labour efficiencies released. Sentispec's cost model puts these at €100,000 to €300,000 a year at a medium warehouse, and one 3PL network measured a 6 to 8% productivity improvement. Whether that becomes cash or capacity depends on what you do with the hours, so we do not put it in a payback.
- Downtime avoided. At the wind turbine manufacturer, every minute of production downtime costs €7,000. No hourly labour rate captures that, and it is the single reason the smallest site in our benchmark broke even fastest.
- The audit itself. Auditor approved reports generated automatically, and a recording behind every discrepancy line, change how long a stock audit takes to sign off. That is a finance and audit benefit rather than a warehouse one.
If you want the cost side examined properly rather than modelled, read what a manual stocktake costs. If you want measured outcomes rather than a model, the ten site benchmark publishes accuracy, value realised and break even for every live deployment with the method stated. For the method comparison on its own terms, see automated stocktaking against manual counting.
Next step
Bring the numbers you just entered to the demo.
A 30 minute demo on recordings from a site with your racking and your label format, ending with the payback for your own inputs rather than ours.