Among life’s most precious commodities is time. That’s especially true of business owners and managers. In his 1784 essay, Ben Franklin famously advised that time is money but that equivalence isn’t true: time is more valuable than money. Why? Because you can use time to make more money but you can’t buy more time no matter how much money you want to pay for it.

Successful people intuitively know this and manage their time accordingly. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Carlos Slim all have the same 24 hours in their days as we do. Even if they wanted to trade their entire fortunes for one more hour of time in their lives, they couldn’t. Unfortunately most people—even rich ones—devalue their time with activities better left for others to do.

Senseless economics. My friend, for example, is a $300-per-hour lawyer who insists on saving $400 every three months by spending an entire weekend in Florida’s searing heat, cutting a fast-growing, eight-foot hedge that encloses his backyard using an electric trimmer. He says it’s an awful pain but I have to think it’s one he enjoys because the economics don’t make sense.

Cash management can be the same way. Many business owners and managers think that handling cash is core to their business because it represents their receipts for what they sell or do. That’s understandable but it’s not economically rational unless they’re in the cash logistics business. After all, what they sell or do is what’s core to their business—and the more time they spend doing that, the more money they’ll make.

Take a vacation. Counting and securing cash, taking it to the bank, reconciling petty cash, and making change are all activities that take time, often surprising amounts of it. Depending on how much cash a business takes in, minding the money can take up to 10 to 15 percent of someone’s working hours. That’s not to mention the security risks involved, including employee theft or a robbery.

In a 10-hour working day (with many business owners and managers working more than that), someone could spend up to 90 minutes handling cash. Over a year’s worth of six-day weeks (that many business owners and managers do work), that’s almost 500 hours or 10 weeks of time that could be otherwise invested in serving customers, promoting more business, or even…imagine…sleeping in or taking a vacation.

Pennies a day?  No, turning your cash management chores over to professionals like Garda Cash Logistics won’t cost you pennies a day, like fast-talking sales types might suggest for their potions and gimmicks. But, for many businesses, it’s more like a few dollars more than what they pay to have their trash removed.

In fact, while most people would think cash management is core to what banks and financial institutions do, more and more are not handling their own cash because they realize their employees’ time is better spent on customers and generating revenue. Business owners should take note.

By outsourcing their cash management to Garda and implementing services like CashLINK and EvenXchange (that can bring the right amount of needed change to you with just a phone call), they can save themselves as much as 500 hours each year and lower their risks of theft and robbery. What will they do with all that time? Get a second job? Hopefully not.