Key takeaways
- Manual invoice or receipt entry costs roughly €0.55 per page, based on a fully-loaded bookkeeper cost of about €1,100/month processing around 2,000 pages/month, the same figure Pileform's own pricing calculator uses.
- Cost scales with page count, not document count: a single-page receipt costs €0.55, while a full-month business bank statement (20 pages) costs around €11.00 at the same rate.
- The €0.55/page figure covers several stacked tasks: keying header fields, keying VAT per line, matching to a supplier and account, filing the source document, and correcting mis-keyed entries.
- Pileform's own per-page pricing runs from roughly €0.33/page at the smallest plan down to about €0.23/page at the largest, against the same €0.55 manual-entry baseline.
01The starting number, and what it assumes
Start from one assumption: a bookkeeper costs a practice roughly €1,100 a month, fully loaded, salary and overhead, and processes about 2,000 pages of source documents a month by hand. Divide one by the other: manual entry costs approximately €0.55 per page.
That is the same figure our own pricing calculator uses to show a saving.
Two things this figure assumes: it is a fully-loaded staff cost, not just a wage, and "a page" means one page of a document, so a single-page receipt and one page of a forty-page bank statement cost the same to key in. Change either input and the per-page rate moves with it.
02From a page rate to a document rate
At €0.55 a page, a document's real cost depends on its page count:
A single receipt barely registers. A quarter-end pile of forty invoices and three bank statements, at these rates, runs well past a hundred euros in manual-entry cost alone.
03Where the €0.55 actually goes
The per-page rate is not one task, it is several, stacked:
- Reading and keying the header fields, supplier, date, invoice number, and total, before VAT or line items are touched.
- Keying VAT per line, not just a document total, working out whether a printed figure is inclusive or exclusive, and at which rate, line by line.
- Matching the document to a supplier and an account, so it lands in the right place in the ledger rather than a suspense account.
- Filing the source document so it is still findable, as a scan, a folder entry, or an attachment, for whenever an auditor or reviewer asks.
- Correcting mis-keyed entries, the rework a fully-loaded cost figure absorbs even on a well-run team, since manual entry is never zero-error.
04What changes the calculation
Automating the reading step, which is what invoice automation means here, does not remove every task above, filing and review still happen, but it removes the keying and re-keying the €0.55 figure mostly pays for. Pileform's own per-page pricing runs from roughly €0.33 a page at the smallest plan down to about €0.23 a page at the largest, against the same €0.55 manual-entry baseline, before counting the time a bookkeeper gets back to do the parts of the job a page rate cannot replace.
The right comparison is never a flat percentage: it depends on a practice's page volume and its own fully-loaded staff cost, which is why the assumptions above are stated rather than folded into a single quoted saving.
This is our own worked model on the stated assumptions above, not third-party research or an audited industry study. Substitute your own fully-loaded staff cost and page volume before treating any figure here as a claim about your practice.
Run your own page volume and staff cost through the ROI page, or see current plan pricing on the pricing page.