AccessPoint

ROI calculator and business case for access-to-information programs

FOI ROI calculator.

What a request costs your organization to serve today, what changes with records-in-place workflow, video and audio redaction, and AI Assist, and what the investment returns — in numbers a director, CFO, or council can forward. Every assumption is yours to change; the math updates live.

Steps

Minutes

3-yr

Business case

What your access program costs today

Start with the shape of your workload. If you don't have exact figures, the defaults are reasonable for a mid-sized public body — the point is the cost to serve a request, which most organizations have never put on one line.

Volume, cost, and risk

Access requests per year Formal FOI, ATIP, or public-records requests received

200

Fully loaded hourly cost Salary, benefits, and overhead for the people who process requests

$85/hr

Business areas per request Custodians or departments that typically have to search and respond

Requests past the statutory deadline Share that go to extension or breach — the number a commissioner's office sees first

25%

Hours per request today, by stage Document-based requests; recordings are modelled separately below

Stage 1 Intake, scoping, and collection Logging the request, clarifying scope, directing searches, gathering and de-duplicating records

12 hr

Stage 2 Coordination and clock management Per business area — handoffs, chasing, status updates, extensions (multiplied by your business areas above)

2 hr/area

Stage 3 Review, redaction, and response Exemption decisions, applying redactions, letters, and the response package

5 hr

Staff hours a year

Cost of the program

Cost to serve one request

Requests past deadline a year

Recordings: where the hours multiply

Body-worn camera, CCTV, 911 audio, Teams meeting recordings, and voicemail are the fastest-growing responsive records and the slowest to process. Agencies that have measured it report four to six analyst-hours for every hour of footage. Set this to zero if you never receive recordings.

Video and audio in your request mix

Recordings Share of your annual requests with at least one video or audio record

Recorded hours per such request Total running time of the recordings responsive to a typical request

2 hr

Review hours per recorded hour today Watching in real time, marking, re-watching, rendering. The measured band is four to six; the City of Hayward's court record shows 5.9.

5.0 : 1

What changes with AccessPoint

Each lever has its own defensible curve. Pick a scenario, then adjust any lever: the hints name the product mechanism behind each one, so a reviewer can challenge the assumption rather than the arithmetic.

Scenario

Workflow: records in place, one clock, one workspace

Stage 1 Less intake and collection time SharePoint-native search and records-in-place collection replace export, upload, and re-filing; custodian assignments carry the scope with them and email attachments extract themselves.

45%

Stage 2 Less coordination and chasing Statutory-clock dashboards, My Day, and tracked assignments replace email chains and status check-ins; extensions are recorded with precedent in front of the decision-maker.

25%

Stage 3 Less review and response time Rule-based redaction suggestions, reusable exemption rationale, "processed before" reuse across requests, and a response package that assembles itself with its redaction index.

15%

Recordings: transcript-anchored review and in-tenant detection

Recordings Less media review time Time-coded transcripts replace listening in real time; detection proposes faces and on-screen text; tracking makes one mark cover a whole appearance; mute, bleep, distort, and the burned release with its redaction log generate themselves.

40%

AI Assist: optional, in your own Azure tenant Include AI Assist

AI Assist Further reduction on the hours that remain Intake triage that extracts scope and third parties, drafted custodian search instructions, AI redaction proposals with reasons and confidence, drafted letters and closure rationales, and Ask AccessPoint for "what's outstanding" — every output a suggestion a person decides on. Applied to the document hours left after the workflow savings, so nothing is counted twice.

10%

Compliance and oversight

Deadlines Rework per missed deadline Hours spent per breach on complaint handling, escalation, extension paperwork, and explanations — your estimate

4 hr

Deadlines Fewer requests past the deadline Jurisdiction-specific deadline math, clock dashboards, the Catching-up strip on My Day, and extension precedent make breaches visible before they happen.

50%

Reporting Hours a year compiling statistics and reports Annual report figures, council and executive updates, commissioner returns. The model assumes built-in annual statistics, throughput reports, and the Report Builder replace three-quarters of it.

40 hr

The investment

AccessPoint's licence is a flat annual rate by organization size, published in full. The Azure resources it runs on bill at Microsoft's rates in your own subscription, with no vendor markup. Then count what you stop paying for: the request-management system, the per-seat PDF redaction tools, and any video redaction licence — AccessPoint covers all three in one flat rate.

AccessPoint licence — your organization size

Every size includes every feature — access requests, privacy assessments, breach response, complaints, media redaction, and AI Assist. No per-user or per-module fees.

All-in annual cost
licence + Azure

Infrastructure

Azure infrastructure per year A standard configuration typically runs about $175/month at Microsoft's rates in your subscription. AI Assist adds pay-per-use Azure OpenAI — single-digit dollars a month for a busy department, capped by a budget you set — modelled here as $100 a year when included. Transcription and media processing bill per use; add them here if you process recordings at scale.

$2,100

AI Assist usage (Azure OpenAI, pay-per-use) Added only when AI Assist is included in step 3, so the Azure figure in the summary is this row plus the line above.

$100

Azure total per year

$2,200

Software you would retire Annual cost, all seats. Leave at $0 for anything you don't pay for today.

FOI or request-management software Licence, hosting, and support for the request-tracking system AccessPoint replaces — a commercial FOI suite, a case-management module, or a built-and-maintained SharePoint or Access solution. $0 if you run on spreadsheets and email.

Document redaction licences Per-seat PDF redaction tools the access team uses today, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro or a standalone redaction product, at list price times seats. AccessPoint's redaction workspace covers the request work those seats do.

Video and audio redaction licences Separately licensed video redaction tools, per-seat add-ons to a request suite, or per-file redaction services. Recordings are included in AccessPoint's flat rate.

Licence rates are AccessPoint's public flat rates. A 30-day trial deploys into your own tenant without a credit card, and there is nothing to unwind if you walk away. This model counts access requests only: privacy impact assessments, breach response, complaints, and the privacy risk register run on the same licence and are not costed here, so treat the benefit as a floor.

The outcome

Computed from your inputs. Capacity, cost to serve, and deadline exposure are the three numbers a leadership team acts on; the lever breakdown shows where each dollar comes from so any single assumption can be challenged on its own.

Net annual benefit

$0 gross benefit − $0 all-in cost
Pays for itself in —
— return on every dollar · $0 over three years

0 requests a year past the statutory deadline, down from 0. Each one avoided is a complaint, an appeal, or a deemed refusal that never reaches the commissioner's office.

Capacity returned to the team

0 hr

0.0 FTE equivalent a year — hiring deferred, or backlog worked down with the team you have.

Cost to serve one request

$0→$0

Fully loaded staff cost per request, before and after, at today's volume.

Growth absorbed without headcount

+0%

About 0 more requests a year at the new cost to serve, with the same team.

Deadline exposure

0→0

Requests a year past the statutory clock — the figure in your annual report and in any commissioner's review.

Where the benefit comes from$0 a year

Intake, scoping, and collectionStage 1 workflow savings

0 hr

Coordination and clock managementStage 2 workflow savings

0 hr

Review, redaction, and responseStage 3 workflow savings

0 hr

Video and audio redactionTranscripts, detection, tracking, burned release

0 hr

AI AssistTriage, proposals, drafting, Ask AccessPoint

0 hr

Deadline rework avoidedComplaints, escalations, extension paperwork

0 hr

Statistics and reportingAnnual report, executive and council updates

0 hr

FOI software retiredRequest-management licence, hosting, and support

—

Document redaction licences retiredPer-seat PDF redaction tools

—

Video redaction licences retiredSeparate tools, add-ons, or per-file services

—

The business case, ready to forward

A one-paragraph executive summary written from your numbers, the assumptions behind it, and the three questions a finance reviewer will ask. Copy the text into an email or briefing note, print the sheet, or share a link that reopens with your figures filled in.

Executive summary

of the modelled benefit is enough to break even. Everything above it is return.

—

payback if the model is four times too optimistic.

0 hr

of staff time a year covers the entire all-in cost.

Assumption	Value