How to calculate savings and ROI of maintenance software

In business, we always have to justify the cost of every purchase whether that's buying a new piece of equipment, hiring that additional headcount, or in this case, purchasing software for your maintenance team. It can be one of the most difficult conversations with your boss, but done right, it makes the decision making process so much easier.

We wound up surveying over 10,000 companies that use UpKeep to answer the dreaded question:

How do I justify the cost of UpKeep to my boss?

At UpKeep, we'd been asked this question so many times that we started to dig into our own data and began to notice trends as we tried to understand how much money we help save our customers.

However, before we started trying to estimate the return on investment (ROI) for our customers, we realized there were three most important things to help our prospects communicate value to their boss. This calculation had to be:

1. Simple

2. Accurate

3. Easy to communicate

So, we dug deep into the data and spoke to hundreds of our customers. One example was from Jonathan Price of Jet.com who answered,

UpKeep lets me list the cost of parts on our work orders. That gives me more transparency into what we’re spending month to the month. And, since everyone on our team has an iPad and can create their own work orders, we can eliminate administration hours. UpKeep is THE assistant we’d otherwise have to pay an additional salary for

Other's, like Larry from Mclain Forest Products said,

UpKeep has helped us reduce our downtime to less than 1%. I cannot overstate how minuscule the fee is compared to maintenance cost savings and up-time productivity.

But, then, one of the challenges became, how can we compare apples to apples and compare how much money does maintenance software cost, versus, how much money can I expect to save?

We found the most common thread for estimating ROI and savings between our customers that we surveyed were:

1. Industry type

2. Maintenance team size

3. Average hourly rate

After we compiled all of the data, we developed an ROI / Savings tool to help communicate the value that UpKeep provides. Check it out yourself here!

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https://onupkeep.com/roi-calculator

Thank you to the UpKeep data team that helped surface this insight, to the design team that made this beautiful tool, to our customer success team that spoke to hundreds of our customers asking them about how much money they save from using UpKeep, and most importantly to our thousands of customers that utilize UpKeep today and recognize the value that we provide!

PS. We're hiring if you want to be part of this amazing journey! Check out our listings here 

Ryan Chan,

CEO and Founder at UpKeep