The biggest cost of disconnected business tools is the people time around them, and the subscriptions are the small bit. It's the hours your team spends copying information from one tool to another, the mistakes made while doing it, and the enquiries and follow-ups that fall through the gaps. For a small team, that cost is a lot of times several times bigger than the software bill.
So below is a worked example, and then a way to work out your own number.
A typical stack
A service business with eight people is usually running something like this:
- A website form that sends an email
- A CRM, used by some of the team
- A booking tool
- An email platform for newsletters
- A payments tool
- A project management board
- A shared drive for documents
- A spreadsheet that ties it all together
Each tool is fine on its own. The trouble is the gaps between them, where a person has to carry information from one to the next.
Where the time goes
Follow one new client through that setup:
- The enquiry comes in by email. Someone copies it into the CRM.
- They book a call. Someone checks the booking tool and updates the CRM.
- They say yes. Someone makes the invoice in the payments tool and types the details in again.
- They pay. Someone checks and updates the spreadsheet.
- Work starts. Someone sets up the project, copies the brief in and uploads the documents.
- Every Monday, someone pulls numbers from four tools into a report.
None of these steps take long. But they happen for every client, every week.
A worked example
These are example figures to show how it works. Put your own in.
| Hidden cost | Example | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Copying data between tools | 6 hours a week across the team at £25 an hour | £7,800 |
| Weekly reporting | 3 hours a week at £30 an hour | £4,680 |
| Chasing and status updates | 4 hours a week at £25 an hour | £5,200 |
| Missed or slow follow-ups | 2 lost clients a year worth £3,000 each | £6,000 |
| Errors: wrong invoice, wrong details | 10 hours a year fixing them at £30 an hour | £300 |
| Total hidden cost | £23,980 |
Now compare that with the subscriptions, which for a team this size might be a few hundred pounds a month. The software is the cost you can see. The work around it is where most of the money goes, close to £24,000 a year in this example.
The cost you cannot put in a table
- Nobody trusts the numbers. When figures come from four places, meetings start with arguments about which one's right.
- Knowledge sits in people's heads. Only one person knows how the spreadsheet works, so every holiday becomes a risk.
- Clients notice. Being asked for the same information twice makes a business look less organised than it really is.
- It gets worse as you grow. Every new client adds to every manual step.
Work out your own number
- List every point where someone copies information from one tool to another.
- Guess the minutes each one takes and how many times it happens each week.
- Multiply that by the hourly cost of the person doing it.
- Add the weekly reporting time.
- Count the enquiries or follow-ups you know were missed last year, and what they were worth.
If the total is bigger than you expected, you're not the only one.
What to do about it
You rarely need to replace everything. What we usually do, in this order:
- Connect the tools you keep, so data moves on its own. See workflow automation.
- Make one system the main record for customers, usually the CRM. See CRM setup and migration.
- Replace the spreadsheet with a proper dashboard pulled from the real data. See dashboards and reporting.
- Think about one platform only when you're paying for a load of tools that overlap and the process is specific to you. We go through the sums in custom software vs SaaS.
Start with whatever costs the most in your own table. That's usually where the first project pays for itself.
