Building an Automated Labor Cost Calculation System: A Simple MAKE Use Case

Automation Case Study: A Truly Simple Automated Labor Cost Calculation System

Business owners probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

Especially those of you running small companies with just one or two people — you know it even better. Running a business doesn't always go as planned.

I started working alone, but as the workload grew and more challenging projects came in, I naturally began relying on external workers.

And that's where the problems started.

When 5 to 10 projects pile up every day, it's inevitable that you'll lose track of who did what and where. Every time you hire a new external worker, you have to set accurate labor costs and check payment dates — and while it sounds simple, it's really difficult.

Meticulously recording work hours while busy, then retrieving that data and calculating everything one by one, and if a mistake happens... just hearing about it was stressful enough.

We at IMPAKERS also remember struggling with this. As projects increased and more external workers joined, accurately settling labor costs each time became increasingly difficult.

There were even embarrassing situations where we couldn't process payments on time and felt sorry toward the people who helped us.

Suddenly, a thought crossed my mind: 'Is manually calculating everything one by one really the right way to do this?'

Why We Needed an Automated Labor Cost Calculation System

For small businesses, labor costs are a truly critical expense.

Large companies can afford to assign dedicated staff for calculations, but small companies like ours were always doing it by hand without any system.

We'd end up relying on guesswork like 'they probably worked about this much,' or waste time re-entering work details that workers had submitted into spreadsheets.

With various projects and different rates for each, countless human errors were inevitable.

"Isn't there a way to automatically calculate work hours and expenses without all this hassle?"
Starting from this very question, we built our MAKE automation.

Integrating Toggl Track and Airtable with Make

Since we were already using Toggl Track to monitor work hours, we figured we could leverage that data. We built the automation by connecting 'Toggl Track' with 'Airtable,' which excels at managing work data, through Make.

1. Individual workers enter their work hours and task descriptions with 'project tags' in Toggl Track.

2. The recorded hours and work logs are configured to be automatically saved to the Airtable database.

3. Then, every day at 3 AM, the scenario runs automatically, performing accurate labor cost calculations based on each participant's rate and work hours from the previous day's project records.

4. As a result, the Airtable dashboard was set up to provide an intuitive, at-a-glance view of project workload distribution, net profit, work hour trends, and labor cost ratios relative to total expenditure.

What Changed After Building the Automated Labor Cost Calculation System with MAKE

After implementing MAKE automation, IMPAKERS experienced three major changes.

1. The labor cost settlement process that used to take at least 30 minutes a day was transformed into an automated process that takes less than 1 minute. Human errors naturally disappeared, and those frustrating moments of redoing work due to calculation mistakes or omissions were gone.
2. We no longer have to worry about calculating hourly rates for external workers with different pay scales. Since each project's rate is registered in the automation, there's no need to check rates and punch numbers into a calculator every time.
3. As a business owner, being able to automatically and clearly see the financial flow became incredibly convenient. As everyone knows, labor costs make or break the finances of small companies. Being able to see labor cost expenditure compared to total costs on a single dashboard has enabled smarter management decisions.

How Much Time and Money Has Automation Saved IMPAKERS?

The numbers are surprising. When you convert the cumulative work time of at least 30 minutes per day over a year, it amounts to 260 hours annually, which at minimum wage equals approximately 2,607,800 KRW.

However, the cost of implementing the MAKE automation system was only 146,995 KRW per year ($108). On top of that, Airtable, which excels at data management, is free to use — you can't find a better alternative. This ultimately resulted in approximately 94.4% cost savings compared to annual busywork expenses.

Now we spend our time on what truly matters instead of repetitive tasks. Instead of draining human energy and time on tedious busywork like data entry and calculations, we can now focus on high-value activities like client consultations, service development, and strategic planning.

'MAKE Automation' That Transforms the Essence of Business

Anyone running a small company like me knows this well. One of the most critical cost management areas in business is ultimately labor costs. Expenditure management is essential, but the 'time spent managing expenditures' should be minimized.

This case study of IMPAKERS automating with MAKE seems like the perfect solution to that need.

Spend more time on your core work,
For all business owners who want to reduce busywork and boost efficiency, we highly recommend
this easy-to-implement automation.

IMPAKERS Blog | Here's another work management automation case study! Read more