Calculator
What do your exceptions cost?
Every case that leaves the happy path takes extra hours to handle. Enter your own numbers and see what that adds up to per month and per year.
How the number is built
Exceptions per month are your monthly cases times the share that leaves the happy path. Hours are exceptions times the minutes each one takes. The yearly cost is those hours times your hourly cost, times twelve.
One full-time person counts as the number of working hours per month shown under the results. The defaults are an illustration, so change every number to match your own team.
Nothing is stored while you use the calculator.
Where the defaults come from
The sliders start at values we hear in conversations with insurers and brokers. Every figure below is anonymized and rounded. They show what is typical, so replace them with your own numbers.
Cases per month: from about 50 to 1,300
Volumes differ a lot between teams. A claims team of three at a small broker handles around 50 claims a month. A team of five or six at a mid-sized broker handles about 7,000 files a year, which is close to 600 a month. Larger desks with fifteen to twenty handlers work through roughly 800 cases per person per year, or 1,000 to 1,300 a month in total. The default of 400 sits between the small and the mid-sized team.
Share of cases that leave the happy path: about one in four
The one hard number we have comes from a legal expense insurer, where handlers ask for extra documents on 26% of files. Other teams describe the same pattern without a figure. There is almost always something missing, and one broker told us customers forget their bank account number nine times out of ten. We start at 25%. Count the incomplete files in one month to get your own rate.
Handling time per exception: 15 to 60 minutes
Handlers tell us that opening a new claim from an incoming email takes 10 to 20 minutes. They read the mail, download the attachments, look up the client, create the file and ask for what is missing. One customer put a new claim at about 15 minutes. A credit broker told us a full file intake takes around an hour. An exception adds chasing and waiting on top of the standard work, so the default is 35 minutes.
Cost of an hour: about €45
No prospect gave us an hourly cost, so we use Eurostat labour cost statistics as a guide. The 2025 euro area average is €38.20 per hour, social charges included. We start a little above that, at €45, as an estimate for someone who handles cases. If you know your fully loaded rate, use that instead.
Exceptions are where the hours go
Penbox keeps every piece of a case in one place, so the next handler does not start by searching. Book a demo to see it on your own process.