How should you judge value without inventing savings?

Ledger 1: Cash and contribution

Record additional completed-job contribution and verified cash expenditure avoided. Subtract incremental implementation and operating cash costs, including any extra paid supervision, rework or support.

Do not count every unanswered call as lost revenue. Do not count work your existing callback process would have recovered as wholly incremental. Do not assume that booked work will be completed or that the business has capacity to deliver it.

Ledger 2: Staff capacity and service quality

Record task time removed, then subtract review, exception handling, correction and ongoing administration. Show released capacity separately unless there is a credible, evidenced cash consequence.

Avoid counting the same benefit twice—for example, both valuing released hours as a cash saving and claiming the contribution from jobs those same hours enabled.

Comparison and decision

Where practical, compare equivalent enquiry or quotation cohorts using the existing process and the pilot. If you use a before-and-after comparison, record changes in staffing, demand, marketing and job mix, and describe the attribution limits rather than claiming causation automatically. Government AI evaluation guidance distinguishes experimental, quasi-experimental and theory-based approaches and recommends choosing a proportionate method. (gov.uk)

Set the observation period around your actual workflow. Commercial quotation and installation outcomes may not be observable within a short demonstration period; do not substitute activity counts for the outcome you intended to measure.