Most of the manual admin I help with fits one of five patterns, wherever it turns up. Here's how each one tends to show up.
01
Nobody decided this should happen. It's just what you get when a process that works gets built up in one head, one decision at a time, over years.
Seen in: Six warehouses, the same number of people: a fleet tyre service that outgrew its paperwork
02
Each system holds its own hand-typed copy of the same details. Every copy is right on the day it's entered, and they drift apart from there.
03
Sometimes a brief goes stale. Sometimes it was never complete to begin with, for entirely good reasons. Either way, the system gets built for a smaller job than the one that actually exists.
Seen in: Membership, payments and scheduling platform for a youth sports club
04
If one person has to personally check or approve every job before it can move, the business can only move as fast as that person is free.
05
An error caught as it's typed costs seconds. The same error, caught at year end, means decisions have been made on wrong figures for months, with no line item to point to.
Use the cost calculator to see what it's costing you, or tell me which task takes the most time.
