This is Article 2 in the SME Insights Season 2 series.
Nobody budgets for it. Nobody tracks it. But almost every growing SME is paying it — every single day.
In the last article I talked about the mismatch that builds up when software doesn’t quite fit the way a business works — and how workarounds quietly become part of the job. This time I want to put some numbers on it. Because the cost is real, it’s significant, and in my experience most business owners genuinely haven’t added it up.
The problem with invisible costs is that they never make it onto a P&L. But they show up everywhere else — in overtime, in errors, in the pace at which the business can grow.
What does a workaround actually cost?
Let’s start with something concrete. Think about a member of your team who spends time each week reconciling data between two systems — copying information from one place to another, checking it matches, correcting the errors that crept in. It’s a task that exists purely because the systems don’t talk to each other properly.
Say it takes three hours a week. That’s 150 hours a year. For a team member on a £30,000 salary, you’re looking at roughly £2,000 a year — just for that one task. For a more senior person, double it.
Now multiply that across your team. How many people have a version of that task?
Here’s a simple illustration for a team of ten:
- 3 people spending 3 hours/week on manual data tasks = 450 hours/year
- 2 people spending 2 hours/week chasing missing information = 200 hours/year
- 1 person spending 1 hour/week fixing errors from re-keying = 50 hours/year
- Total: 700 hours/year — at an average fully-loaded cost of £20/hr, that’s £14,000/year
These are illustrative figures based on patterns I see regularly. Your numbers will vary — but the exercise of actually counting is usually eye-opening.
£14,000 a year is a meaningful number for a business of that size. It’s a part-time hire. It’s a serious piece of software. It’s several months of marketing budget. And it’s being spent on work that produces nothing — it just keeps things from falling apart.
The cost that doesn’t show up in hours
Time is the obvious one. But there are costs that are harder to put a number on and arguably more damaging.
Error cost. Every time information passes through a human hand unnecessarily, there’s a chance for a mistake. A wrong figure in a quote. A missed update to a client record. A delivery going to the wrong address because the order was re-keyed from an email. These errors have direct costs — rework, refunds, client relationship damage — but they’re almost never traced back to the system that caused them.
Capacity cost. When your best people are spending a meaningful part of their week on low-value administrative work, they have less capacity for the work that actually moves the business forward. This is a growth constraint that’s very hard to see from the inside.
Morale cost. Good people notice when they’re spending time on work that feels pointless. The experienced operations manager who spends Friday afternoon manually updating three spreadsheets knows it’s a waste of her time. It’s a slow drain on the kind of people you most want to keep.
The workaround isn’t just a cost. It’s a signal — that the system isn’t doing its job, and the people are compensating for it.
Why the cost keeps growing
Here’s what makes this particularly frustrating: the cost doesn’t stay flat. It grows with the business.
When you’re five people, the workarounds are manageable. Everyone knows the quirks. The founder is close enough to the detail to catch things before they go wrong. But at fifteen people, or twenty-five, the same workarounds start to fracture.
- New team members take longer to get up to speed because the process is in people’s heads, not in the system.
- The person who built the master spreadsheet leaves, and nobody fully understands how it works.
- A new client with slightly different requirements breaks the workaround entirely.
- You try to bring in better reporting and discover the data is too inconsistent to report on reliably.
Growth exposes the fragility. And by then, the cost of fixing it is higher than it would have been two years earlier.
The question most owners never ask
When I work with a business as a technology adviser — before we talk about building anything — one of the first things I do is map where time is actually going. Not where people think it’s going, but where it actually goes.
The results are almost always surprising. There’s usually one or two processes that are consuming a disproportionate amount of time, and that the business has simply stopped questioning because they’ve always been done that way.
That mapping exercise — understanding the real cost before deciding what to do about it — is something a larger business would have a CTO oversee. At SME scale, it doesn’t need to be a full-time role. But it does need someone to ask the question with fresh eyes and some experience of what good looks like.
Most of the time, the cost of fixing the problem is significantly less than the cost of continuing to live with it. The issue is that nobody has ever put both numbers on the same piece of paper.
A question worth sitting with this week
Pick one regular task in your business that exists because two systems don’t connect properly, or because the system can’t quite do what you need. Estimate how many hours a week it takes across your team. Then multiply by 52, and by the hourly cost of the people doing it.
Is that number bigger than you expected?
I’m Richard, co-founder and CTO of Maly IT Solutions, based in Suffolk. We work with SMEs across East Anglia to build software that fits the way businesses actually work — and to help owners understand the real cost of the systems they have before committing to anything new.
If you’d like to do that mapping exercise properly, I’m happy to have that conversation. No pitch — just an honest look at where the time is going and whether there’s a practical fix.
Free 30-minute call, no commitment.
📧 hello@maly.co.uk | 📞 01473 934672 | 🌐 maly.co.uk