The mileage spreadsheet is the most expensive piece of software your firm runs.
It's also the only one with no line item.
This is the bit most Irish SMEs miss when they push back on switching to a paid mileage system. The spreadsheet is "free" in the sense that it has no subscription fee. It's not free in any other sense. The cost is real, recurring, and bigger than the subscription it replaces - it just lives in places that don't show up on a profit-and-loss statement.
Let's actually count it.
The cost categories nobody adds up
When firms calculate the cost of a "free" spreadsheet, they look at the time the finance lead spends reconciling. That's category one. There are five more.
Category 1: Finance-team reconciliation time. Niamh's Thursday night. The 8-12 hours per month a finance lead spends pulling per-engineer tabs into a master pivot, chasing missing trips, and producing the payroll export. At a fully loaded €50-60 per hour, that's €400-€720 per month, or €4,800-€8,640 per year.
Category 2: Engineer time logging trips. Each engineer spends maybe 20 minutes a month catching up on their own trip log - end-of-week paperwork, end-of-month chase emails, query responses. At €60 per hour for an engineer's loaded cost, that's €20 per engineer per month, or €240 per year. For a 30-engineer firm: €7,200 per year.
Category 3: Manager approval time. The project leads who approve mileage claims spend roughly 30 minutes per month in spreadsheet queries: which leg goes where, which receipt is missing, why this engineer's YTD doesn't match their team's records. Five managers at €70 per hour, half an hour each per month: €105 per month, €1,260 per year.
Category 4: Error correction. The 12-month-old underpayment that surfaces during audit. The over-billing to a client that has to be credit-noted. The engineer who walks into a one-on-one with a printed spreadsheet asking why their February pay was light. Each of these events costs time, and the bigger ones cost goodwill. Hard to quantify exactly, but typical firms see €2,000-€5,000 per year of error-correction work that wouldn't exist if the records were right the first time.
Category 5: Audit exposure. The contingent cost. Revenue selects you for a PAYE compliance intervention. Your ERR submissions are filed but the underlying records won't reconcile to them. Best case, you spend two weeks producing reconstructed records and the inspector accepts them. Worst case, the inspector reclassifies a sample of payments as taxable, and the look-back goes three or four years. For a 30-engineer firm with messy records, the worst-case exposure is the high tens of thousands. Even at a 10% probability over five years, the expected cost is €1,000-€3,000 per year.
Category 6: Finance-team turnover. The under-discussed one. Finance leads who spend Thursday nights reconciling 47-tab spreadsheets eventually leave. Replacing a finance lead in Ireland costs roughly €12,000-€18,000 in recruitment, onboarding, and lost-month productivity. If the spreadsheet workload contributes to a finance lead leaving every three to four years instead of every five to six, that's an extra €3,000-€5,000 per year amortised.
Total, for a 30-engineer firm: €19,500 to €30,800 per year. The mid-point is around €25,000 - which is what "free" costs.
The three firm-size scenarios
The cost scales with firm size, but not linearly. Smaller firms have less reconciliation overhead per engineer because their spreadsheets are simpler. Larger firms have more, because the cross-checking across projects gets harder.
Scenario A: 10 engineers
| Cost category | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| Finance reconciliation (4-6 hrs/month) | €2,400 - €3,600 |
| Engineer logging time | €2,400 |
| Manager approval time | €600 |
| Error correction | €800 - €1,500 |
| Audit exposure (expected value) | €500 - €1,000 |
| Finance-team turnover (amortised) | €1,000 - €2,000 |
| Total annual cost | €7,700 - €11,100 |
OdoHub for 10 engineers: €4,800/year subscription (€400/month minimum), plus €300-€1,500 setup. Year one all-in: €5,100-€6,300. Year two onward: €4,800.
The breakeven for a 10-engineer firm is roughly month four. After that, the spreadsheet costs more than the system that replaces it.
Scenario B: 30 engineers
| Cost category | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| Finance reconciliation (8-12 hrs/month) | €4,800 - €8,640 |
| Engineer logging time | €7,200 |
| Manager approval time | €1,260 |
| Error correction | €2,000 - €5,000 |
| Audit exposure (expected value) | €1,000 - €3,000 |
| Finance-team turnover (amortised) | €3,000 - €5,000 |
| Total annual cost | €19,260 - €30,100 |
OdoHub for 30 engineers: €14,400/year subscription, plus €950-€1,500 typical mid-year migration setup. Year one all-in: €15,350-€15,900.
The breakeven is roughly month eight or nine. The total annual saving from year two onward is €5,000-€15,000, before counting the project-margin recovery the system also enables.
Scenario C: 80 engineers
| Cost category | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| Finance reconciliation (15-20 hrs/month) | €9,000 - €14,400 |
| Engineer logging time | €19,200 |
| Manager approval time | €3,360 |
| Error correction | €5,000 - €12,000 |
| Audit exposure (expected value) | €3,000 - €8,000 |
| Finance-team turnover (amortised) | €5,000 - €8,000 |
| Total annual cost | €44,560 - €64,960 |
OdoHub for 80 engineers: €38,400/year subscription, plus €2,500-€5,000 enterprise setup with API integrations and SSO. Year one all-in: €40,900-€43,400.
The breakeven is roughly month ten in year one, and from year two the firm saves €6,000-€26,000 annually on the spreadsheet's hidden cost - not counting the project-margin recovery.
The categories I deliberately didn't count
Two big costs I left out of the model, because they're harder to put a number on but they're real.
Project margin leak from misallocated mileage. The earlier piece on project allocation gets into this. For a 30-engineer firm with billable client mileage, the typical leak runs around €4,200 per engineer per year - roughly €126,000 across the firm. That's not in the spreadsheet's "hidden cost" because it's not a finance-team cost - it's a billing accuracy cost. But the spreadsheet enables it, and the system fixes it.
Engineer trust hits. The Eileen-finds-her-€600-underpayment moment. The reputational cost of a finance team that the engineering team doesn't trust to pay them correctly. Hard to price. The trust hit is real all the same.
The breakeven question
Most firms ask "is this worth €40 per traveling staff member per month?" The honest answer for any firm above 10 engineers running grey fleet is yes - by a comfortable margin, before counting the margin recovery, before counting the audit defence, before counting the engineer trust.
The spreadsheet was always the right tool when you had four engineers and one project. It stopped being the right tool somewhere between 10 and 15 engineers - usually before anyone noticed. Most firms are operating two or three years past their spreadsheet's actual usefulness, and the reason they haven't switched is that nobody's added the categories up.
The harder bottom line
Your finance team's time costs more than €40 per traveling staff member per month. The spreadsheet doesn't show that on an invoice. The day the spreadsheet stops scaling, the cost shows up all at once - usually as a finance lead handing in their notice, or as a Revenue letter requesting records.
If you'd like to walk through what the cost looks like specifically for your firm size and process - and what the move off the spreadsheet would actually save - book a 20-minute demo. Bring last month's reconciliation spreadsheet if you can. The numbers tend to clarify the conversation.
Last updated: 28 April 2026.
