Typing the same thing twice costs more than the typing
The minutes are the small part. The real cost starts when the two copies stop agreeing.
The cost you can see
Re-keying data looks harmless. Ninety seconds to copy an order from an email into the system, or a customer's details from one tool into another. But 90 seconds, 30 times a day, is 45 minutes. Across a small business, re-keying commonly adds up to 3 to 8 hours a week.
The cost you can't see
The bigger bill arrives when the copies drift apart. Someone updates one and not the other. From then on, you pay for:
- Checking which version is right before doing anything
- Regular reconciliation to bring them back in line
- Mistakes that reach customers, like the old address or last year's price
- Reports nobody quite trusts
- An unwritten rule about which copy is "the real one", which new staff learn the hard way
Why it sticks around
Each instance is small and spread across lots of people, so nobody with the authority to fix it ever sees the full cost. And it usually started as a temporary bridge between two systems bought at different times. Temporary has a way of becoming permanent.
How to fix it, cheapest first
- Remove the double entry. Sometimes one of the copies simply isn't needed.
- Pick one source of truth. Choose the system that's right, and treat every other copy as read only.
- Connect the systems so information moves between them on its own.
- Change where it's first captured, so information goes in once, in the right place.
Where to start
Count three things: how many places the same information gets typed, how many minutes each one takes, and what the disagreements cost you over the last year. The answer is usually bigger than anyone expected. If most of it happens in spreadsheets, read how to know when your business has outgrown Excel.