Monday morning. Three execs in a room. Two hours blocked out.
The first thirty minutes are the meeting.
The next ninety are everyone arguing about why their numbers don’t agree.
Nobody had ever calculated what that ninety minutes cost the business, because the ninety minutes had always been part of the job…
The licence fee for your SaaS platforms is easy.
It arrives, you pay it, it sits on the P&L where the bookkeeper can find it.
The other bill - the one your team pays every week in hours they don’t log against any project - never arrives in a format anyone can file.
So nobody files it.
So nobody sees it.
So the business runs for years on a cost it has never priced.
We built a seven-question audit to give that cost a number. It’s called The Perception Check: Systems.
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Here are three stories from the audits we’ve already run. All anonymised. All real.
One. The 50, the 20, and the 30.
A community services provider running 14 SaaS platforms. Fifty staff, a few dozen external staff, and volunteers on the books.
The licence bill on the P&L: forty-five thousand a year.
The itty bitty detail that nobody had on a spreadsheet: only twenty of those fifty had direct system access to their main CRM. The others (internal staff, external staff and all the volunteers) worked around it daily.
- Exporting from one tool
- Reformatting in Excel
- Re-entering into another
- Asking a colleague to look something up because their own login didn’t work
- Keeping a running list in OneNote because the CRM didn’t show them the field they needed
When we costed the workaround hours at a loaded rate, the labour bill came in higher than the licences.
That wasn’t even the punchline.
The punchline was the lost opportunities the spreadsheet couldn’t capture:
- The grant application that didn’t get submitted in time because the data had to come from four places.
- The funder query that took six days to answer because nobody owned the master copy.
- The two staff who left inside the year because the job had become a daily exercise in working around tools that didn’t trust them with access.
Forty-five thousand on the invoice. A multiple of that off it.
They’re choosing a different path now.
Two. The forecast that disagreed with itself.
A professional services firm running a finance system, a project tool, and a CRM. The leadership team had a forecast meeting every Monday morning - recall the delightful opener to this tale…
It always took two hours.
The first thirty minutes were the meeting. The next ninety minutes were the team arguing about why the three numbers from the three systems didn’t agree.
Once a month the office manager spent a full day stitching the three exports together for the board pack. Nobody had ever calculated what that day cost the business, because the day had always been part of the job.
When we did the maths, the answer was just under eighty thousand a year across the business. The bulk of it landed on people senior enough that their time should have been spent elsewhere.
They had two options. Integrate the systems so the forecast was a single number, generated once. Or replace the three tools with a platform that already did it.
They chose integration. Six weeks of work, paid for inside the first quarter of the savings.
The Monday meeting still happens. It runs for twenty minutes now. The team makes decisions instead of reconciling them.
Three. The booking that took an hour
A small Sydney ceremonies business. Weddings, funerals, naming days. The booking workflow ran across multiple platforms - the website, the calendar, the contracts tool, the payment system, the customer database.
Each booking touched four people in the chain and took about an hour, end to end.
Thirty bookings a week. Diabolical!
Nobody had ever multiplied those numbers together. When we did, a full-time admin role was buried inside a business that didn’t realise it was hiring one. The hour wasn’t on anyone’s timesheet because the hour was part of how bookings had always worked.
We built them one platform. Three-sided - clients, celebrants, operations - synced with their website.
A booking that used to take an hour on a desktop and four people now takes thirty seconds on a phone. From the couch.
What the three have in common.
In every case, the answer had been there the whole time. The hours were being worked. The exports were being done. The spreadsheets were being maintained. The cost was real.
The only thing missing was somebody costing it.
It had all been normalised…
That’s the whole job of the audit. Take what’s already happening, give it a number, hand the number back to you in dollars and FTE-equivalent hours.
Once you have the number, the path is usually obvious.
Your turn.
The Perception Check: Systems is free. Seven questions. Two minutes.
At the end, you get your annual cost in real dollars and FTE-equivalent hours. One of three paths matched to your situation: Accept, Integrate, or Modernise. And a personalised four-page PDF explaining what your path means and what to do next.
No call from me, or a pitch. Just the number.
We run the audit on ourselves once a year. Last time we found three things. Two we kept. One we changed. The point isn’t that we’re absent of sin in this area - it’s that we know how easy it is to fall into the trap.
Pick one workaround in your business. Just one. The Monday reconciliation. The CSV export. The colleague who keeps a list in OneNote because the system doesn’t show them what they need.
Ask one question about it: how many hours a week does this take, across the people doing it?
Don’t fix anything. Don’t even bring it to the team yet. Just write the number down.
Then run it through the audit. You’ll have the dollar figure in a jiffy.
Annnd, go!
#BeAVillager
- Ben