Cost and Benefit Calculator: TCO and ROI

Puts the licence, consulting and maintenance cost of your current software, or of another product you were quoted, side by side with HNR. With your own figures it calculates total cost of ownership (TCO), return on investment (ROI), payback period and net present value.

It contains no prices and does not touch your company data. You enter every figure yourself. The figures are stored only in this browser, are not sent to the server and are not visible to other users.

Where to open it

Open Cost and Benefit Calculator from the Tools group in the dock (next to the Calculator). It reads and writes no company data, so it needs no separate permission.

How to use it

In General, enter the number of users, the comparison period (1-10 years), the hourly labour cost, the annual discount rate and the currency.
In the Cost items table, enter the figures for the current or competing software on the left and for HNR on the right. Leave any item that is not in your quote at 0.
In Benefits, enter what you expect to gain after moving to HNR: working time saved, lower stock, faster collection, savings on scrap and errors, and other benefits.
The result on the right updates as you type. Use Copy summary to take it as text, or Download CSV to open the year-by-year table and the breakdown by item in Excel.

Fill with sample values is there to show how the fields work. The sample values are not a price quote from HNR or from any other vendor, and a strip at the top of the window says so while they are in use. Reset clears every figure.

Cost items

One-time: licence fee × number of users, setup and consulting days × consultant day rate, customisation, hardware and servers, training, data migration. All of them go into the start year.
Annual: subscription (monthly per user × 12), maintenance and updates (a percentage of the licence fee), support and consulting days, hosting and server upkeep, add-on modules and integrations, in-house IT effort (hours/month × 12 × hourly labour cost).
Annual price increase: annual items grow by this rate every year. It is entered separately for each side; one-time items do not increase.

Benefits

Time saved = hours saved per week × 52 × hourly labour cost.
Lower stock = average stock value × expected reduction × stock carrying cost. Faster collection = annual sales × days saved ÷ 365 × cost of financing. In both, only the annual carrying or financing cost is counted; the cash that is freed up is gained once and is not added to the benefit.
First-year realisation rate: in the year of the switch only part of the benefit arrives (50% by default). In later years the benefit is not increased with prices; the calculation is deliberately cautious.

How to read the results

Total cost: the one-time and annual costs of each product over the chosen period. Cost difference = current software − HNR; if it is negative, HNR costs more over that period. Net gain = cost difference + total benefit.
Return on investment (ROI) = net gain ÷ total cost of HNR. If the HNR cost is entered as 0, it cannot be calculated and — is shown.
Payback period: the month in which the cumulative net difference rises above zero and does not fall back. Immediately means you are ahead from the start; Not paid back within the period means you are still behind at the end of the chosen period.
Net present value: each year's net difference is discounted to today at the discount rate; the start year is not discounted. The chart shows the cumulative cost of both products and the cumulative net gain; the Breakdown by item shows which item the difference comes from.

On a phone

On a phone the window opens in five steps: General, Current software, HNR, Benefit and Result. The Result step has the same figures, the chart, year-by-year cards, Copy summary and Download CSV.

Limits

Tax, depreciation and exchange differences are not taken into account. Enter every figure in the same currency and treat tax consistently (all excluded or all included).
Nothing is filled in automatically from your company data. For the average stock value and collection time you can look at the Reports › Finance › Working capital report.
Because the figures are stored in the browser, they do not appear on another computer or browser. To share them, copy the summary or download the CSV.