The Real Cost of Manual Work

In the words of Radioheads bombastic front man Thom Yorke “You do it to yourself, ye do, and that’s what really hurts, ye do it to yourself, just you, you and no one else, you do it to yourself……”.

The general consensus is that technological change must be dramatic and huge! Rip out that old Cobol system and stick in the shiny new cloud based one! But sometimes small changes can have an outsized effect. As a recovering Fund Accountant I know all about manually messing around with files, day in day out…

Let’s take a simple example. What is the cost of manually manipulating a file for 10 minutes, daily, for a year? Time wise this works out as a staggering 43.33 hours per year. Let’s assume the company has a graduate (lets call him Jack) performing this mindless endeavour and pays him 30k per year for the privilege. This works out at €570 per year for just that one file.

But the Euro spend is not the only cost.

We also need to consider the following:

• Boredom: Nothing beats the Monday morning blues for Jack like manually copying and pasting data from one file into another.
• Employees Leaving: Because of the above….
• Training costs: Because Jack is going to leave….and you know it…Also Jane needs to review Jacks' work as he’s junior and Jane doesn’t work for free either.
• Manual Errors: Inevitable….
• Delays downstream: Jack is out sick and the file hasn’t been processed so the next step in the chain fails….we didn’t have time to do the training and the other Jack left.
• Opportunity cost: Jack should be spending his time serving the client or performing some other value add activity.

Humans are clever, but we process data in a way that is both dangerous and prone to error.

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

The reality is that companies have a lot more than one file to be manually processed. This stuff can and needs to be automated. At Fund Recs we have developed an automated solution called Fusion to process, enhance and transform any file type from PDF to SWIFT. All done by Jack, with No code involved!

You can listen to Thom (Radiohead - Just)

To discuss, or if you would like a demo, please contact Des O'Donohoe at des@fundrecs.com