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Every month, Sai counts what your sales and marketing automations actually completed, subtracts the time people spent fixing and reviewing them, converts the rest into hours, cost, and FTE capacity, and updates the business case — so the answer to "what did we actually save?" is already written.
Almost every automation business case is written before the automation exists, and almost none are checked afterwards. The spreadsheet assumes a task takes twenty minutes, multiplies by volume and salary, and produces a satisfying number. Three months later the CFO asks what was actually saved, and the honest answer is that nobody measured. The estimate did its job — it got the budget approved — but it cannot get the next budget approved. A measured number can.
The first run sets a baseline from a timed sample of how long each task takes by hand. Every month after that, Sai counts what each automation actually completed, subtracts the time people spent taking over failed runs and reviewing output, and converts the net hours into cost and FTE capacity. Tool costs come off the top. The result is a business case that updates itself, with every figure labelled as measured or estimated.
Most sales and marketing automation lands in the same five places. For each one, a clear unit and a timed baseline matter more than a precise salary figure.
Gross savings — tasks completed times minutes saved — are the number vendors quote and the number CFOs quietly discount. Net savings subtract what people still do: taking over runs that failed, checking output before it reaches a customer, fixing records that came out wrong. The gap between the two is worth watching on its own. If review time is not falling month over month, the automation is not yet trusted, and that is a more useful finding than any ROI percentage.
Hours saved are converted into full-time-equivalent capacity, so a result reads as "about half an SDR's month freed up" rather than a pile of minutes. It is reported as capacity available for other work — more accounts researched, faster follow-up — not as headcount to remove. That framing is more accurate, since saved hours are rarely clean enough to eliminate a role, and it is the version that keeps team leads feeding the automation real work.
The baseline stays fixed, so every month is compared against the same manual starting point. Past months are not recalculated. A task with a missing count is shown as not measured instead of repeating last month's figure. After a quarter, the measured trend replaces the original estimate as the centre of the business case — the document you bring to the next budget review is evidence, not a forecast.
The time this frees up usually goes back into pipeline, which shows up in the channel CAC payback model. Two of the most common tasks to measure first are triaging outreach replies and building a weekly prospect list. For the finance side of the argument, the CFI guide to return on investment covers the standard formula.