If someone on your team spends 10 hours a week re-keying data between your CRM, your accounts package and a spreadsheet, that’s roughly £10,200 a year in wages, before a single mistake gets made. Most business owners have never sat down and worked out that number. Once they do, the case for fixing it writes itself.

We see this constantly during Full Systems Audits: an order comes in on Shopify, gets typed into Xero, then copied again into a spreadsheet for the ops team, then chased up by email when something doesn’t match. Nobody designed this. It just grew, one workaround at a time, until it became “how we do things.”

The worked example

Take a business with one person spending part of their week on manual data entry: copying orders, updating spreadsheets, chasing figures between systems that don’t talk to each other. Using the median UK hourly wage of £19.67 (ONS, April 2025), here’s what that actually costs across the year.

That’s wages alone, for one person, doing one job badly designed. It doesn’t include the time a manager spends checking the work, the customer who got the wrong invoice, or the VAT return that took three attempts because two systems disagreed on a number.

The hidden costs on top

Wages are the easy bit to calculate. The costs that actually sting are harder to see on a spreadsheet.

Sage’s 2025 research into UK business admin found that the average business loses 24 days a year to financial admin such as invoicing, chasing payments and correcting errors, the equivalent of working 13 months but only getting paid for 12. Half of the CEOs and COOs surveyed said they personally spend four hours a week just dealing with payment issues. One accountant quoted in that research put it plainly: clients spend “two to three days every month chasing payments or correcting invoices, that’s time they could be using to grow their business.”

A separate 2025 survey of 500 UK business owners by NerdWallet found admin and operational tasks eat up 7.3 hours of a leader’s week, 21% of their total working time, costing an average of £18,663 a year in owner time alone. The same survey found a third of business owners are still managing their finances manually with spreadsheets or pen and paper.

None of that shows up as a line item anywhere. It just shows up as a busy team that never quite catches up.

What this looks like day to day

It rarely looks like one obvious job called “data entry.” It’s a booking taken over the phone and written on a pad, then typed into a diary system that afternoon. It’s a supplier invoice that arrives as a PDF, gets checked against a spreadsheet, then keyed into the accounts package by hand. It’s a lead that comes in through a contact form, gets copied into a CRM, then copied again into a quote tool because the two don’t share data.

Each of these takes a few minutes. None of them feels like a project worth fixing on its own. That’s exactly why they survive for years, and why the annual total in the table above always surprises people the first time they see it written down.

Why it doesn’t get fixed

Nobody sits down and decides to run their business this way. It happens gradually. A spreadsheet gets built to patch a gap. It works, so it stays. Two years later it’s load-bearing, three people depend on it, and nobody remembers why it exists in the format it does.

The real barrier isn’t cost. It’s that the pain is distributed. No single person feels the full £10,000 to £20,000 a year, they feel twenty minutes of friction, five times a day, and that’s not painful enough to escalate. Add it up across a team and a year, and it’s usually enough to fund the fix twice over.

What actually fixes it

You don’t need to rip out your CRM or your accounts software to solve this. In most of the audits we run, the fix is connecting the systems you already have, not replacing them.

That usually means one of three things.

A native integration, where your CRM or ecommerce platform already talks to your accounting software out of the box. This is the cheapest option when it exists, but it often doesn’t cover every field you need.

An automation platform like Make or Zapier, sitting between your existing tools and moving data automatically when something happens: a new order, a signed contract, a status change. This covers most of what businesses with 5 to 50 staff actually need, and it’s far cheaper than bespoke development.

Bespoke integration via API, built specifically for how your business works, when the off-the-shelf options genuinely can’t do what you need. This costs more upfront but removes the workaround entirely rather than automating around it.

Which one is right depends on your systems, your data volumes and what “correct” actually looks like for your business, which is exactly what we map out in a Full Systems Audit.

Where to start

Before you spend anything on automation, work out your own number using the table above. Ask each person doing manual entry how many hours a week it actually takes, be honest, most people underestimate. Multiply by 52. That’s your business case, in writing, before anyone builds anything.

If you want a second opinion on where the time is really going and what fixing it would look like, our Full Systems Audit (£695) maps your current systems, flags where the manual work is hiding, and gives you a clear plan, not a sales pitch for software you don’t need. You can book one at /technical-audit/.

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