The Rekeying Tax
The hours someone spends retyping numbers from one system into another are the smallest part of what it costs. The larger part is errors found weeks late and decisions made on last month’s numbers, and a direct connection ends both.
Two systems, one spreadsheet, and someone rekeying it every month. The hours are the smallest part of what it costs.
The larger part is the errors found weeks after they were typed, and the decisions made on numbers a month old. Connecting the two systems directly ends both.
It started as a stopgap. The client system and the accounting system didn’t talk to each other, so someone exported one, tidied it in a spreadsheet and typed the totals into the other. That took an afternoon, years ago. Now it takes two days a month, done by the most careful person in the office, the only one who knows which columns to ignore.
Most firms past a certain size have at least one gap like this: the policy system and the billing system, the fund platform and the regulator’s template, the time-tracking tool and the invoicing. Like the knowledge tax, the cost never appears on a timesheet. It hides inside job descriptions (“reconciles monthly”, “prepares reporting”), and nobody budgets for a cost they have never seen itemized.
The hours, worked through
These numbers are illustrative. Put your own in; the shape rarely changes.
Say 600 transactions a month move from one system to the other by hand, at two minutes each. That is 20 hours a month, two and a half working days, before anyone checks the work. It is 240 hours a year. At $60 an hour, fully loaded, it is $14,400.
Now say one entry in a hundred is keyed wrong: a transposed digit, a missed line, a client picked from the wrong row of a dropdown. That is six errors a month. None is caught when it is made. Each turns up later, at reconciliation, at month-end or from the client, when it takes far more than two minutes to trace and fix.
The $14,400 is the part you can see, and the smallest line on the bill.
What the hours leave out
The left column is paid once. The right column is paid for as long as the spreadsheet lives, and most of it never appears on a report, because the spreadsheet is the report.
The worst line is the fourth. When the numbers meet only once a month, by hand, every decision in between rests on figures that are weeks old. Nobody chose that; it is the speed at which a person can retype.
Why the gap survives
Nobody owns the space between two systems. Each vendor points out, correctly, that its system can export and import. The person doing the rekeying is good at it, and asking them to stop feels like a criticism, so the stopgap becomes a role.
Where two systems cannot be connected, robotic process automation (a software robot doing the retyping) is an improvement. Most modern systems, and many old ones, can exchange data directly, and a direct connection beats any typist, human or robot: it moves every record the same way every time, and it leaves a trail.
How to end it
Start with the connection that ends the most rekeying. It gets a fixed price before any work begins, then runs beside the spreadsheet for one full cycle while your team checks its numbers against the old way, line by line. Where a decision matters (an approval, a write-off, a payment above a limit), a person still signs off; the software only spares them the retyping. Then the spreadsheet is retired, and the next connection starts.
Saranga, who leads web and integration on our team, has spent fifteen years building for the web and connecting systems, QuickBooks and payment integrations among them, and built real-time financial dashboards at MJ Hudson.
What gets typed twice in your business every month?
Book Free Assessment