Only one of them
is definitely money.
Keep these in separate rows and never total them into one headline. Cost avoided is arithmetic: last year you paid for four tools and a percentage of tuition, this year you pay for one platform and an accounting package, and the difference is bankable. Hours freed are real but become money only under a condition. And revenue enabled is the one every vendor calculator leans on hardest and the one you should estimate most conservatively, because attributing a retention improvement to software rather than to a good teacher or an easy year is genuinely difficult.
A school that presents only the first row to whoever signs the cheque will make a smaller, more credible case — and will not have to explain, a year later, why the promised number did not appear in the accounts.
An hour freed is money
only if something changes.
The standard vendor move is to multiply hours saved by an hourly rate and call it a return. That is only true in two cases: the hours were paid for and are no longer paid for — a part-time administrator's contract reduces, overtime stops — or the hours are re-deployed into something that earns, most obviously teaching. If the freed hours simply become a less exhausting week, that is a genuine and important benefit, and it is not cash. Put it in the case as what it is: retention of staff, which has its own real cost when it fails.
Two rules keep the number honest. Halve your first estimate, because the first estimate is always made on the assumption that everything works immediately and nobody spends the first month learning the new system. And use a defensible hourly value — actual cost including employer overheads for staff, or your own realistic alternative use of the time if it is you. Inflating either end is how ROI cases become embarrassing.
For the teacher side of the hours, the measurement method matters more than the arithmetic. The five-question survey gives a before-and-after figure from your own staff, which is the only number worth putting in this calculation. The one external data point we will offer, with its limits attached: in a one-term pilot at Intellect Academy — our sister school — teachers reported that lesson preparation and grading time fell by roughly half. One school, one term, self-reported, owned by the same company as SprintUp. Useful as an indication of what the design is aiming at; not a figure to put in your spreadsheet.
Plausible mechanisms,
conservative numbers.
There are three mechanisms by which a platform genuinely can increase revenue, and each is worth estimating at the low end. Fewer lost enrolments: a family who can enrol and pay in four minutes at eleven at night converts better than one who must wait for an email reply on Monday. Better retention: absence patterns noticed in week three produce a phone call that keeps a student who would otherwise have drifted. Faster collection: money arriving before the term rather than six weeks after it is not more revenue, but it is the same revenue earlier, which for a small school is the difference between planning and worrying.
If you want a number, build it from the smallest credible assumption — two retained students a term, say, at your own fee — rather than from a percentage uplift. A concrete, modest, traceable figure survives scrutiny; a percentage borrowed from a vendor's case study does not.
The number that
actually decides it.
Rather than a return percentage, calculate how long the change takes to pay for itself. It is easier to defend and harder to inflate.
Worked as an illustration with round numbers: a school pays €7,250 a year for the new platform from the TCO worksheet, stops paying €5,400 for tools and a revenue percentage it no longer incurs, and frees an hour and a half a week of paid administration worth about €1,950. Net annual cost is a small negative — the change pays for itself — against one-off migration and training of €1,200, giving a payback inside the first year. Change any assumption and the answer changes; the point is the structure, and that the largest positive line is cost avoided rather than anything speculative.
Three ways,
including ours.
Counting hours as cash that stay in the building. The commonest inflation, and it turns a genuine quality-of-life improvement into a fictional saving. If nobody's pay changes and nothing new is taught, the cash effect is zero.
Comparing against a broken baseline. Much of what a platform "saves" could be saved by fixing a process without buying anything — collecting fees in advance, publishing a timetable before enrolment, writing down a curriculum. Those improvements belong to the process change, not to the software, and a school that attributes them to the purchase will over-credit it and repeat the error next time.
Ignoring the transition. The first month is slower, not faster. Migration, training and the period where two systems run in parallel are real costs, and leaving them out of the payback line is how a nine-month payback gets presented as three.