Errors surface late, by a customer or at month end

Most of us have had two letters from the same organisation with our name spelled differently on them. That's not a typing mistake. It means two records are being held for the same person, and nobody knows which one is right.

Why timing is the whole story

Caught as it's typed, an error costs seconds. Caught by the next person along, it costs minutes and an interruption. Caught by the customer, it costs an apology and some goodwill. Caught at year end, the business has been making decisions on wrong figures for months, and every report drawn from those figures is quietly wrong too, while looking exactly like every other report.

Why it never shows up as a cost

Nobody bills a business for an error caught at year end. It never turns up on an invoice, so it never gets counted, which is exactly why it persists. It only shows up as a business that's a little less profitable than its own numbers suggest.

What tends to help

If the same information is entered once, in one place, and everything downstream reads from that one place, there's nothing left to disagree with itself. Read more in what errors actually cost you.

Work out what the same pattern is costing in your business with the admin cost calculator, or see how the Admin Automation Audit maps it.