Skilled staff stuck doing admin? What it costs you

Key takeaways

Skilled staff doing admin cost the business their full hourly rate on work a trained administrator could do at a fraction of the price. In professional services, the real cost is the billable hour lost. Measure the admin hours, move repeatable tasks to a support team, and put the freed hours back into billable or specialist work.

• £27 per worked hour is roughly what a £40,000 employee costs before overheads.
• 5 hours a week of fee-earner admin at £150 an hour is £750 of billable time.
• Managed offshore admin support typically costs £9–£18 per hour.
• Move the repeatable admin, not the client relationship.

Why is skilled staff admin so expensive?

Every hour a skilled employee spends on admin costs their full hourly rate and removes an hour of the work you hired them for. An engineer on £40,000 a year costs about £27 per worked hour once employer National Insurance and pension are added. Paying that rate for data entry or chasing is expensive admin.

In fee-earning businesses the true cost is higher still, because the hour lost is a billable hour, not a salary hour.

• When should a UK business consider outsourcing?

How do you measure skilled staff admin time?

Ask skilled staff to log admin tasks for two weeks, then multiply the hours by their loaded cost or charge-out rate. Include the small, frequent tasks: updating systems, chasing documents, booking and rearranging, raising paperwork. These are easy to overlook and usually make up the largest share.

• Hours per week on admin, by person.
• Admin tasks by type: chasing, data entry, scheduling, paperwork.
• Loaded hourly cost or charge-out rate for each person.
• Monthly total cost of skilled admin.

• Run a time audit to find what to outsource
• Work out your cost per task before you outsource

Which admin tasks should move off skilled desks first?

Move the tasks that are frequent, rule-based and interrupt specialist work. Document chasing, scheduling, CRM and case updates, data entry and first-line email triage are the usual candidates. They follow clear steps, so a trained support team can run them with a written process and a short escalation list.

• Chasing clients and third parties for documents and signatures.
• Scheduling and rescheduling appointments and site visits.
• Updating case, job or CRM records after each step.
• Preparing standard paperwork from templates.

• Outsourcing CRM admin and data hygiene

What does moving admin off skilled staff cost?

As an indicative market range, managed offshore admin support costs £9–£18 per hour and onshore UK support £20–£35. If five fee earners each spend four hours a week on admin, 20 hours a week at £12 per hour costs about £1,040 a month. Those 20 hours back at a £120 charge-out rate are worth far more.

The saving only becomes real if the freed hours go on billable or specialist work. Plan what the time will be used for before you move the admin.

• Work out the ROI of outsourcing

Why do skilled staff hold on to admin?

Because it is easier to do it than explain it, because nobody asked, and because some admin feels like control. Specialists also worry that handing over chasing will upset clients. A short written process, a clear escalation rule and a trial period usually overcome this within a few weeks.

• How to tell your team you are outsourcing

When should skilled staff keep the admin?

Keep admin with skilled staff when it is inseparable from their judgement, such as reviewing technical documents, or when it is so small that handing it over costs more than doing it. Regulated firms should also keep sign-off with qualified staff and outsource only the preparation around it.

• Compliance admin burden: what you can hand off

How do you set up admin support for skilled staff?

Give the support team clear inputs and clear limits. Specialists should be able to pass work on in one step, such as a shared task list or a tagged email, and the support team should know exactly which decisions they can make and which they escalate. Start with one task type per specialist and add more as trust builds.

Agree a response rhythm too. Specialists want to know when chasing will happen and when records will be updated, so a same-day or next-morning standard works better than as soon as possible.

• One hand-off route: a shared task list or tagged inbox.
• A written escalation list: what support decides, what it passes back.
• A daily summary to each specialist rather than constant questions.
• A monthly review of hours returned and what they were used for.

• How to manage an offshore team well

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see in UK accountancy and legal practices: qualified staff spend five to eight hours a week chasing clients for records. Moving the chasing to a managed team with a template sequence and an escalation rule returns those hours to client work, and records arrive faster because chasing now happens every day, not when someone finds time.

• See client work
• Outsourcing for professional services firms
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Skilled staff admin checklist

Use this to move admin off specialist desks.

• Ask each specialist to log admin for two weeks.
• Multiply the hours by loaded cost or charge-out rate.
• List the tasks by type and frequency.
• Write a one-page process for the largest task.
• Agree what the freed hours will be used for.
• Hand it over and review after 8 weeks.

Next step

Tell us how much admin your specialists are carrying. We will help you work out what it costs and which tasks to move first. 30 minutes, no pitch.