Every morning, someone opens online banking in one window and the invoicing software in another. Line by line, they confirm who has paid, mark the invoice as paid and move on to the next. Two hours later, they know exactly what the bank already knew at eight in the morning.
It is careful work, done by someone capable. And it shouldn't need to exist.
The work nobody sees
Payment reconciliation is just the most visible example. There are invoices issued by hand from data that already sits in another system, documents copied between programs that don't talk to each other, and approvals stuck in an inbox until someone remembers them.
None of these tasks shows up as a cost. It shows up as ‘what the admin team does’.
The numbers
Six people spending twelve hours a week on this kind of work, over 46 working weeks, at €14 an hour including employer costs, comes to €46,368 a year.
- 6people doing repetitive work
- 12 ha week, each
- 46working weeks a year
- €14an hour, including employer costs
It's a conservative estimate: it counts only the hours, with no errors, no rework and none of the opportunities missed while those people are copying data.
Why it's still done by hand
Because it works. Whoever checks the payments rarely gets it wrong, so nobody feels any urgency to change. The cost doesn't show up as mistakes.
The cost isn't in the mistakes. It's in the hours someone capable spends confirming what is already known.
There is also the worry that automating means switching software. In most cases it doesn't: the systems already in place start sharing information with each other.
How to measure it
For one week, everyone in the admin team notes down, at the end of each day, how long they spent copying, checking or retyping data that already existed somewhere else. A rough estimate is enough for the first number.
Three questions to ask this week
- 1How many hours a week go into reconciling payments?
- 2How many documents are written by hand from data that already exists?
- 3How many approvals are stuck right now, and for how long?
Multiplied by the hourly cost and the weeks in the year, the answers give you the figure that goes into the calculator.
What changes
At MPL Imobiliária, checking rents took up 480 hours a year. Today the checks and the reports run on their own, and those hours have gone back to the team.
The people are still there. They stop copying data and deal with what really needs a person: the customer who called with a question, the supplier who asked for an exception, the decision that doesn't fit a rule.
Written by
Rui Pereira · Systems Engineering
Gets systems that never talked to each other sharing information.
