Meten Is Weten: Calculate Our Cost of Chaos Per Invoice

Your “Free” Process is Expensive

I hear this excuse constantly: “We don’t need an expense management tool. Our office manager, Sarah, handles it. She is fast.”

Sarah is paid €45,000 a year. That is roughly €0.40 per minute (fully loaded with taxes and overhead).

I watched a “fast” process recently.

1. Sarah receives an email with a PDF.
2. She opens the PDF to see what it is.
3. She logs into the accounting software.
4. She types the vendor name.
5. She types the date.
6. She types the amount.
7. She drags the PDF into the folder.
8. She realizes she made a typo. She fixes it.

Total time: 4 minutes. Cost: €1.60.

This sounds small. But this company processes 300 invoices a month. That is €480 per month spent on data entry. Just typing. Not analyzing, not negotiating, not thinking. Typing.

You are paying a human being to be a bad version of a script.

The Hidden Cost: The Error Multiplier

The €1.60 is the best-case scenario. It assumes Sarah makes no mistakes. But humans get tired. Humans get bored.

When Sarah types €1,000 instead of €100, and you pay it, the cost of that invoice just went up by €900. When she categorizes a client dinner as “Office Supplies,” you lose the tax deductibility or skew your project margins.

The cost of chaos is not just the time spent doing it right; it is the time spent fixing it when it goes wrong. Fixing a reconciliation error at month-end takes 10x longer than processing the transaction correctly the first time.

If you have to touch an invoice more than zero times, the process is broken.

The ROI: The Stopwatch Test

We do not make decisions based on feelings. Meten is weten. (To measure is to know).

Tomorrow, do this experiment. It requires no software, just a phone.

1. Pick a random invoice.
2. Start a stopwatch.
3. Perform every step required to get that invoice from “Inbox” to “Paid and Reconciled.” Include downloading, renaming files, logging into portals, and approving payments.
4. Stop the stopwatch.

If that number is higher than 60 seconds, you have a leak.

Now, multiply that time by your hourly rate. Multiply that by your monthly volume.

Activity	Time/Unit	Cost/Unit (@€50/hr)	Monthly Cost (200 inv)
Manual Entry	6 mins	€5.00	€1,000
OCR/Automation	0.5 mins	€0.42	€84

[TO EDITOR: Visualize the table above as a bar chart comparing a huge red bar (Manual) vs a tiny green bar (Automation). Label the difference ‘The Stupidity Tax’.]

Stop The Bleeding

You are not saving money by doing it manually. You are lighting it on fire.

If you presented me with a bill for €1,000 for “Data Entry Services,” you would fire the vendor. Yet you let your internal team bill you for this every month.

Automate the ingestion. If the software costs less than the time you save, buy it. If it doesn’t, don’t. It is simple math.

FAQs

My team is salaried, so manual entry is technically free, right?

Wrong. Opportunity cost is real. If they are typing data, they are not chasing revenue or analyzing margins. You are paying high rates for low-value work.

Automation software is too expensive for us.

OCR software costs €20/month. Your Finance Manager costs €40/hour. If the software saves 30 minutes, it paid for itself. Do the math.

How do I measure this?

Use a stopwatch. Time the process from 'receive email' to 'reconciled in bank'. Average it. Multiply by hourly wage. Cry.