Free tool
What are repeat errors costing you?
A rough figure in about a minute. Put in what you know, leave the rest, and the estimate updates as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Your numbers
Enter annual figures. You can use any currency: the maths does not care. Leave a field blank if you do not know it.
Turnover for the last full year.
The share of work completed with no rework or correction. If you do not know it, try 90, a common starting guess for a business that has never measured it.
Including the labour to redo it, any material written off, and the time someone spent chasing it.
Jobs you had to go back to after the customer had them. These usually cost far more than an internal rework, because they include travel and lost goodwill.
Travel, labour, parts, and the time of whoever handled the complaint.
Estimated annual cost
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estimated cost of poor quality, per year
- Rework inside the business
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- Remedial work after delivery
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- Errors a year
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- As a share of revenue
This is arithmetic on the numbers you entered, nothing more. It is a starting point for a conversation, not an audit: the real figure needs your actual records.
Check this against your real records
Free Margin Leak Review: about an hour on a sample of your own records. Your rework number is usually bigger than your rework log. About the Rework Cost Diagnostic →
The formula, so you can check it
There is no hidden model here. The estimate is:
(errors a year × cost to put one right) + (remedial visits × cost per visit)
where
- errors a year = jobs a year × (1 − right-first-time rate).
So a business doing 2,400 jobs a year at a 90% right-first-time rate reworks roughly 240 a year. At £250 to put each one right, that is £60,000 before any remedial work is counted.
Why the right-first-time rate matters most
It is the one number most businesses have never measured, and it drives everything else. A business that believes it is at 99% when it is actually at 92% is underestimating its rework volume roughly eightfold, which is why the diagnostic starts by costing the errors rather than estimating them.
What the number does not include
This estimate covers rework labour and remedial work. It leaves out several things that are real and often larger, because they cannot be sensibly estimated from a few inputs: lost capacity when the same people are redoing work instead of producing, overtime and expediting, management time spent on complaints, credits and goodwill gestures, and the business not won from customers who did not complain.
The published estimates of what poor quality costs a business are therefore usually higher than a calculator like this suggests, not lower.
Where this fits
A calculator gives you a range to act on. A Rework Cost Diagnostic gives you the actual figure: it costs every repeat failure from your own records, traces each one to where it is made and where it should have been caught, and ranks where fixing the process will save the most.
Unfamiliar with the terms on this page? The glossary explains cost of poor quality, right first time and the four cost buckets explained.
Want the real figure instead of an estimate?
A free Margin Leak Review checks the estimate against a sample of your real records, and shows where the money is going.
Free. About an hour. You keep the findings.