Count the hours your team spends retyping things that already exist

Pick one person in your office tomorrow and watch what they actually do for an hour.

You will see them copy an order from WhatsApp into Excel. Then type the same details again into the bill. Then write it once more in a register because that is how it has always been done. Then send a photo of the bill back on WhatsApp.

One order. Four times. And every one of those four is a chance to get a digit wrong.

The arithmetic nobody does

Ten minutes a day sounds like nothing. That is the problem, it sounds like nothing.

Ten minutes a day is about an hour a week. An hour a week across four people is a working day gone, every single week. Over a year it is more than fifty days of somebody's working life spent retyping information the business already had.

And you paid full salary for all of it.

The cost is not only the salary. It is the mistakes, because a figure typed four times is a figure that will eventually be wrong once. It is the arguments about which version is correct. And it is the quiet one: the capable person you hired to grow your sales is spending the first hour of every day doing data entry.

Where to start

Not with a big system. Start with a list.

For one week, have everyone note every time they enter the same information in a second place. Just that. No analysis, no meeting.

At the end of the week you will have a list of ten to fifteen things, and three of them will be responsible for most of the hours. Those three are where the work belongs. Everything else can wait.

Most owners expect this list to be about software. It is really about finding out what your team has been quietly putting up with.

Before you read anything else today: how many hours a week does your team spend typing the same information twice?

Finding those three tasks and taking them off your team is exactly the work we are good at. Send us your list and we will tell you which one to remove first.