Interactive tool
TMS Business-Case Calculator
A business case is arithmetic on honest inputs, not a vendor's slide. Put in your numbers — hours a system removes, cash you could mobilize, fees and losses it prevents — and see the annual benefit, payback and ROI. It's the tool behind the TMS business-case guide and the total-cost-of-ownership breakdown.
Total annual benefit $0. Net annual benefit $0. Payback from start —. Simple ROI over 3 years —.
Your summary builds here as you enter figures. The worked example below shows a finished one.
Every figure here is arithmetic on the numbers you entered — the tool supplies no benchmarks and makes no assumptions on your behalf. The ROI shown is simple/undiscounted; add a discount rate to see an NPV as well. Either way treat it as a directional case, not a formal appraisal. A credible business case uses inputs you can defend to your CFO, not round numbers from a vendor. Nothing you type leaves your browser unless you press Share link, which puts these figures in the URL itself.
Worked example
A group replacing spreadsheets with a treasury system, using this form's own placeholder figures. They are illustrative inputs to show the arithmetic — not benchmarks, and not a claim about your company.
Inputs
- Manual hours removed / week20
- Fully-loaded cost / hour$60
- Idle cash you could mobilize$5,000,000
- Extra yield on it2%
- Bank / fee saving / year$40,000
- Loss avoided / year$25,000
- Annual licence + run$120,000
- Implementation (one-off)$250,000
- Months to go-live0
- Appraisal horizon3 years
Result
- Labour saved (20 × $60 × 52)$62,400
- Cash mobilized ($5,000,000 × 2%)$100,000
- Fees + losses avoided$65,000
- Total annual benefit$227,400
- Net annual benefit (− $120,000)$107,400
- Payback ($250,000 ÷ net)2.3 years
- Benefit over 3 years$682,200
- Cost over 3 years$610,000
- Simple ROI over 3 years12%
Read it as: the case clears the annual licence with $107,400 a year to spare and repays the implementation in a little over two years — but most of that rests on mobilizing idle cash, so that one input is the number to defend hardest. Timing matters too: put 6 in months to go-live and payback moves to 3.4 years (41 months), past the 3-year horizon, where simple ROI drops to -7%.
How this works
Methodology
Annual benefit = labour saved (hours × rate × 52) + cash mobilized (idle cash × extra yield) + fee savings + losses avoided. Net annual benefit subtracts the annual licence; payback is implementation ÷ net annual benefit, pushed out by any months to go-live and the licence paid during them; ROI is (total benefit − total cost) ÷ total cost over your horizon, and an optional discount rate adds an NPV.
Assumptions
- Every figure is yours — the tool supplies no benchmarks and no defaults.
- Costs start on day one; benefits start in full after the months to go-live and stay steady (no ramp-up or decay is modelled).
- Cost is the annual licence + run cost plus a one-off implementation.
Limitations
- ROI and payback are undiscounted; the optional discount rate adds an NPV, not an IRR.
- It assumes benefits are realized; a failed or delayed project earns none of them.
- Soft benefits (better decisions, control, resilience) are not quantified here — make that case separately.
Frequently asked questions
How does the calculator get from my inputs to a payback figure?
Four benefit lines, added: labour saved is hours per week × hourly rate × 52; cash mobilized is idle cash × the extra yield you'd earn on it; then your bank/fee saving and your losses avoided, both entered as annual figures. Subtract the annual licence and run cost and you have the net annual benefit. Costs start on day one; benefits start after the months to go-live you enter (0 by default). Payback is the month, counted from project start, when cumulative benefit has repaid the implementation and every month of licence paid so far — shown as never if the net isn't positive — and the horizon view compares the benefit earned after go-live with the implementation plus the licence over your chosen number of years.
Which benefits should I put in the calculator?
Only the hard ones — defensible numbers a CFO will accept. Control, audit and resilience are genuinely valuable but legitimately hard to quantify, so present them separately as risk reduction rather than a saving. A case that needs the soft benefits to work won't be believed.
Does this payback figure account for the cost of capital?
Only if you give it a discount rate. The ROI is always simple and undiscounted. Enter a discount rate and the calculator adds an NPV over your horizon: monthly cash flows — the implementation up front, the licence every month, benefits from go-live — discounted at that annual rate. It is still not an IRR, and payback stays undiscounted, so run a formal appraisal alongside it if your finance function requires one.
What costs am I likely to forget?
Total cost of ownership is more than the licence: implementation, integration and bank connectivity, internal effort, ongoing run and support, and upgrade or change costs over the life of the system. The calculator asks for an annual licence plus run cost and a one-off implementation, so fold those other items into whichever of the two they belong in rather than leaving them out.
What does the share link expose?
Every figure in the form — hours, rates, idle cash, fees, losses, licence, implementation, horizon, months to go-live, discount rate and currency symbol — encoded into the URL and copied to your clipboard. Email it opens your own mail client with the same link already in the body, which is handled by your machine, so the address you send it to never reaches this site. Nothing is posted to a server by either button, but the numbers travel inside the link, so treat sending it as sending your draft business case. Without that button nothing leaves the page: the form is held in this browser's local storage, and consent-gated analytics records only that the calculator was used, copied, exported or shared and whether the case came out positive.
Can I take the summary away, and will the form still be here?
Copy puts the full summary on your clipboard and Download .md saves it as tms-business-case.md — as tables that paste cleanly into a document — benefit lines with the arithmetic spelled out beside each one, the two cost lines, then net annual benefit, months to go-live, payback, the horizon comparison, the simple ROI and, if you set a discount rate, the NPV. The inputs themselves are saved in this browser and restored on your next visit, with Start fresh to clear them; a colleague's shared link never overwrites your own saved figures unless you press Keep it in this browser.
These answers are about the calculator. How you justify a TMS, what the ROI usually comes from and what a business case should contain are covered in the TMS business-case guide and the total-cost-of-ownership breakdown.