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Re-keying is the easiest inefficiency to spot and the easiest to dismiss. Somebody enters an order into one system and then enters the same details into another. It takes ninety seconds. Nobody is going to redesign an operation over ninety seconds.

Which is precisely why it survives for years, and why it is usually more expensive than anyone has calculated.

The visible cost

Start with the arithmetic anyway, because it is worth seeing written down. Ninety seconds, thirty times a day, is forty five minutes. Call it three and a half hours a week, roughly a hundred and seventy hours a year. That is over four working weeks, spent typing something that already exists elsewhere in the business.

For most small businesses that number lands somewhere between three and eight hours a week once you count every instance, and almost nobody has added it up before being shown it.

The cost nobody counts

The typing is the cheap part.

The moment the same information exists in two places, it starts to diverge. From then on you do not have a record. You have two claims.

Something changes. A delivery address, a price, a contact name. It gets updated in one system, because that is the system the person making the change happens to work in. The other copy is now wrong and nothing anywhere indicates that.

What follows is a series of costs that never get attributed to re-keying:

• Verification. Once people learn the two do not agree, they start checking both. You have added a step rather than removed one.
• Reconciliation. Somebody periodically works through the differences. This is often a monthly ritual that everyone regards as normal.
• Errors that escape. Something goes out against the stale copy. Wrong address, wrong price, wrong contact. The cost is the correction plus whatever it does to the customer's confidence.
• Reporting nobody trusts. When two systems produce different numbers, decisions get made on instinct instead, which is a real cost even though it will never appear on any line.
• An informal authority. Eventually the business decides one copy is the real one. That knowledge is rarely written down, so it becomes another thing that lives in somebody's head.

Why it persists

Because each instance is genuinely small, and because the person doing it is rarely the person who could authorise changing it. The cost is spread thinly across a lot of people and a lot of days, which makes it invisible to exactly the person who would need to act.

It also frequently began as a sensible decision. Two systems were bought for two good reasons at two different times, and joining them was going to be a project, so somebody bridged the gap manually as a temporary measure. That was four years ago.

Fixing it

In rough order of cost.

Remove the second entry entirely

Ask what the duplicate copy is actually used for. Sometimes it feeds a report nobody reads, or a system that has been superseded. The cheapest integration is deletion, and it is available more often than you would expect.

Name one system as authoritative

If both copies must exist, decide explicitly which one wins and write it down where people can see it. This does not stop the typing but it does stop the verification and most of the reconciliation, which is usually the larger share.

Connect them

Many common business systems will pass data to each other, either natively or through a connector, for a modest monthly cost. This is worth doing once you know exactly which fields need to move and in which direction, which is a question the mapping answers.

Change the sequence

Occasionally the fix is that the information is being captured at the wrong point entirely. Capture it once, at the right moment, in the right place, and the second entry has nothing left to do.

Whichever route applies, the first move is the same. Count the instances, count the minutes, then count what the disagreements have cost you over the past year. The second number is nearly always the one that makes the decision.