Data Platform ROI & Business-Case Calculator
Before you sign off a Microsoft Fabric or Power BI build, the board wants the number. Enter how many people spend time stitching data together by hand, what those hours cost and the platform spend — and get the annual hours recovered, the payback period and the three-year return you can take into the approval.
Manual data work today
Platform investment
Figures are currency-neutral. Recovery is modelled at a conservative 70% of manual effort, over 46 working weeks.
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Enter your details to reveal the result
We’ll show hours recovered, labour cost recovered, payback period and three-year ROI, and email you the breakdown.
How the business case is built
The recoverable cost most mid-market teams underestimate is manual data preparation — people exporting from SAP, Dynamics 365 or NetSuite into spreadsheets, reconciling them by hand and rebuilding the same report every week. Annual hours lost is team size × hours per week × 46 working weeks. Multiply by the loaded hourly cost to get the labour currently spent on work a Microsoft Fabric lakehouse and governed Power BI datasets remove. The platform recovers a share of that — we model a conservative 70% recovery, because no build eliminates every manual step in year one.
Payback is platform cost ÷ monthly recovered cost; three-year ROI is three years of recovered cost less three years of platform cost, over that platform cost. This counts only labour recovered — it deliberately ignores the harder-to-quantify gains of faster, better decisions, which is where the real value sits. It also assumes the data foundation gets built properly; a platform on an ungoverned foundation recovers far less. See Microsoft Fabric or book 30 minutes with Amit to pressure-test the case against your estate.