Your staff retype data from one system into another? What it really costs and how to stop

An order arrives in the webshop. Someone types it into the ERP. Then someone else types the same data into Excel for the warehouse, and a third person sends the customer a confirmation email. Every day, for every order. When you ask why, the answer is always the same: that’s how we’ve always done it.

Nobody sees it as a problem, because it doesn’t show up on any invoice. But you pay for it every month.

What it really costs

This is an example calculation. Put in your own numbers:

Item	Value
People retyping data	5
Time per person per day	2 hours
Working days a year	220
Total hours a year	2,200
Cost of an hour of work, say	€20
Cost a year	€44,000

And that’s only the time. Manual entry has costs that don’t show up in hours:

• Errors. A mistyped address, a duplicate order, a wrong amount. Each one ends up as a complaint, a return or an angry customer.
• Delay. Data in the second system is always late, sometimes by an hour, sometimes by a day. The warehouse doesn’t know what’s been sold, and sales doesn’t know what’s in stock.
• Dependence on one person. There’s always someone who “knows how it works”. When they’re on holiday, the work stops.
• No growth without hiring. Twice as many orders means twice as much retyping, and twice as many people.
• People leave. Nobody likes spending the whole day copying from one window into another.

Where it happens most often

• the webshop and the ERP or accounting software
• the CRM and quotes, then orders
• sales and the warehouse
• supplier and partner portals, then your own system
• Excel sheets passed around by email between departments
• monthly reports put together by hand from several sources every time

If you recognised even one of these, there is a saving there.

How systems get connected

You don’t need to replace the systems you have. You need to make them talk to each other. Depending on what each system supports, there are a few ways:

• Directly, through an API. The systems exchange data themselves, the moment something happens. An order in the webshop immediately becomes an order in the ERP.
• Automatic file import and export. When an old system can’t do anything else, a file is exported, processed and imported without anyone touching it.
• Scheduled synchronisation. Every few minutes or every night, for data that doesn’t have to be instant.

The solution is usually a combination, matched to what each system can do.

In which order

1. InventoryWhere data is retyped and how long it takes
2. Costliest flowWhat costs the most goes first
3. ConnectSystems talk on their own
4. MonitorAn alert when something gets stuck

You don’t connect everything at once. The flow that costs the most gets connected first, and the savings from it often pay for the next one.

What to watch out for

• What happens when one system is down? A good integration doesn’t lose data when a partner system fails. It waits and tries again, instead of quietly skipping an order.
• Which system is in charge? For every piece of data it has to be clear where the source of truth is: prices in the ERP, customers in the CRM. Otherwise two systems keep overwriting each other.
• Who finds out when something gets stuck? An integration without monitoring is more dangerous than manual entry, because an error can grow quietly for weeks. How to set up monitoring is in the article on application monitoring.

How we work

ProCoding is a .NET studio from Split, Croatia, and connecting systems is one of our main services: webshops, ERPs, CRMs, partner portals, and anything that has an API or at least a file export. We start with an inventory of the data flows and a calculation of what each one costs, and connect the one that hurts most first. The first step is a free 30-minute call.