The Real Cost of Entering the Same Data 5 Times

You’re Already Paying For It. Let’s Add Up the Bill.

A customer places an order. You enter their details into your CRM. Then into your accounting system. Then your payment platform. Then your delivery system. Then your email marketing tool.

Five times. Same information. Different systems.

“It only takes a few minutes,” you think.

Let’s do the maths.

The Direct Labour Cost

The Time Tax:

• 5 minutes to enter data across 5 systems
• 40 transactions per day
• 200 minutes daily = 3.3 hours
• At £25/hour = £82.50 per day
• £412.50 per week
• £21,450 per year

That’s just one person entering data for one type of transaction.

Now multiply that across your entire team and all transaction types.

Suddenly, you’re looking at £50,000-£100,000 annually in pure data duplication costs. For a mid-sized business, the figure can easily exceed £200,000.

The Hidden Costs (The Ones That Really Hurt)

But direct labour is just the beginning.

The Error Cost: Every manual entry is an opportunity for mistakes:

• Transposed numbers
• Misspelled names
• Wrong decimals
• Outdated information
• Incomplete records

Each error triggers a cascade:

• Customer service time investigating
• Finance time correcting
• Management time reviewing
• Customer frustration and churn

One study found that poor data quality costs organisations an average of £12 million annually. For smaller businesses, even 1-2% of revenue lost to data errors is substantial.

The Delay Cost: Manual data entry creates bottlenecks. Orders sit waiting for someone to transfer information between systems. This delay means:

• Slower time to invoice
• Later payment collection
• Extended cash conversion cycles
• Reduced working capital

If you could collect payment 5 days faster on £50,000 monthly revenue, that’s £8,333 in additional working capital. Annually, that compounds into genuine financial impact.

The Opportunity Cost: Your team is entering data instead of:

• Building customer relationships
• Solving complex problems
• Developing new offerings
• Improving processes
• Actually growing the business

This is the cost you can’t easily measure, but it’s perhaps the largest one.

The AI Readiness Cost

Here’s a cost most businesses don’t even consider yet: When your data lives in multiple disconnected systems with multiple versions of the truth, you can’t leverage AI and automation.

Modern AI tools could be:

• Predicting which customers need attention
• Automating routine decision-making
• Spotting patterns you’d never notice manually
• Optimising pricing and inventory

But they can’t do any of this with fragmented, inconsistent data. The cost? Missing the entire next wave of business efficiency.

What Connected Systems Actually Look Like

Imagine entering customer information once. Just once.

That information automatically flows to:

• Your CRM (updated contact record)
• Your accounting system (customer account created)
• Your payment platform (billing details stored)
• Your marketing tools (contact segmented appropriately)
• Your support system (history accessible)

We create solutions where you enter information once and it flows everywhere it needs to go. Plus, we connect all your existing business systems—payments, banking, accounting, CRM—so they actually communicate and share the relevant data automatically.

The ROI Is Obvious

Let’s be conservative:

• Save 3 hours daily in data entry: £19,500 annually
• Reduce errors by 50%: £15,000 annually
• Improve cash collection by 3 days: £10,000 annually
• Redeploy staff to value-added work: £30,000+ in opportunity value

Total quantifiable benefit: £74,500+ annually

For most integration projects, you’re looking at:

• 6-12 months to full ROI
• Ongoing benefits that compound
• Scalability as you grow
• Foundation for future AI capabilities

The Real Question

It’s not whether you can afford to connect your systems.

It’s whether you can afford to keep entering the same data five times.

Ready to stop the repetitive data entry cycle?

Let’s discuss how connecting your systems eliminates duplication and transforms those costs into business value.

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📞 Call directly: 0207 031 9810