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Iterna

My team does too much by hand

Manual work is easy to miss because it never appears as a line on a budget. It shows up as a team that is always busy and a month-end that always takes longer than it should.

This usually looks like

  • Information is copied from one screen into another, every week
  • Reports are rebuilt by hand before every meeting
  • Approvals get chased over WhatsApp and email
  • The same detail is typed into three different places
  • A process only works because one person remembers the steps

Why it happens

Manual steps appear where two systems meet, or where a system stops short of what the job actually requires.

Someone fills the gap because the work has to get done, and the workaround becomes permanent because it works. Nobody ever decides that a person should retype 300 rows a week — it just becomes how it is done.

What we’d do about it

  1. 01

    Watch the process, don’t just discuss it

    What actually happens is usually more involved than the description of it, and the awkward parts are where the time goes.

  2. 02

    Score each step before touching any of it

    How often it runs, how long it takes, and what it costs when it goes wrong.

  3. 03

    Automate the top of the list and check the result

    The automation runs alongside the manual process until the two agree, then the manual step stops.

How to work out what to automate first

The instinct is to start with the task everyone complains about. A better order comes from three numbers: how often the task happens, how long it takes each time, and what it costs when it goes wrong.

Multiply the first two and you have the hours a year. The third number decides how far up the list it should move, because a fast task that produces expensive errors is worth more attention than a slow one that nobody depends on.

This also tells you what not to automate. A task that takes two hours but happens once a year is rarely worth building anything for.

A worked example

An admin exports bookings every Monday, reformats them in Excel, and keys the totals into the accounting system. It takes two hours, so that is roughly 100 hours a year.

The reformatting also goes wrong every few months, and each time it does, someone spends half a day finding the mismatch and correcting entries that have already been filed.

A second task — preparing the quarterly board pack — takes a full day, four times a year. That is 32 hours, and a mistake is caught in the room rather than in the accounts.

The Monday export wins: three times the hours, and its errors reach places that are expensive to correct. It gets automated first, even though the board pack is the task people complain about.

What it costs to leave alone

The hours are the visible cost. The mistakes are the expensive one — a wrong figure that reaches your accounts, an invoice sent twice, a payment missed because the reminder lived in someone’s head.

There is also a capacity cost. The people doing the copying are usually the people who should be handling exceptions, customers and the work that needs judgement.

And it doesn’t scale. Twice the volume means twice the manual hours, which is how businesses end up hiring for work that shouldn’t exist.

Where to go next

Pick the task that annoys your team most.

Tell us what it involves, how often it happens and what breaks when it goes wrong. We’ll tell you whether it’s the one worth starting with.

Tell us your problem