How to Build the Business Case for Custom Software (Board-Ready Template + Simple ROI Calculator)
In 15 minutes, turn your idea into a one-page justification your Finance department can approve.
Before you start; what you'll need:
- A problem/broken process that your department faces every week
- How many people in your department this impacts
- The rough hourly rate of that employee group (estimate is fine)
- How many hours a week is taken up with this manual/legacy process
- If a sales or revenue generation role, how much revenue your average employee creates per month
ROI - return on investment - is simply the ratio of what you gain to what you spend. If you invest $100,000 and it generates $300,000 in value, your ROI is 3:1. Simple enough. But custom software has a unique ability to produce outsized ROI compared to most business investments, and here's why: it doesn't just solve a problem once. It compounds. Every hour saved gets reclaimed permanently, week after week, year after year. And when those saved hours belong to revenue-generating roles, the math gets dramatic fast.
If you're trying to get relief from a dogging problem of your department, you may need to get approval of your boss or finance team. Below are some examples, followed by a simple calculator and template you can use to help justify the cost. In our experience, nothing gets attention (and approval) faster than an outsized ROI.
Example 1
[examples and calculator in development]