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Manual Data Entry Woes: The Golden Gate Bridge Effect
You’re a CRO. So of course, when you think about data entry, you think about The Golden Gate Bridge.
Doesn’t everyone?
The majestic Golden Gate Bridge, brave and tall with its international Orange color, is an iconic landmark, famous across the world.
It’s also a tremendous pain in the backside.
The Bridge needs to be protected against the rust that comes from salty air, fog, and rain. That means that every square inch of its 1.7-mile long span must be painted. It’s a job that can’t be neglected.
It’s a Sisyphean feat. A team of painters paints day in and day out.
Paint.
Dry and start again.
Paint.
Dry and start again.
Day in and day out.
Over and over.
Relentless.
With nothing to show for it.
It sounds exactly like manual data entry, right?
If you’re a Chief Revenue Officer in the IT Services sector, you’ll know how familiar this story is. You and your team live it.
Just like the bridge painters, your team spends countless hours inputting data, checking it, verifying it, and passing it on. And then you start over again. Every day.
The Impact
The process saps every single person of their time, resources, and a little bit of their soul. And it stops them from doing anything else.
But that’s not all – manual data entry has a ripple effect on your entire department making your life a lot harder:
Mistakes with invoices: Humans are gonna human. We make mistakes no matter how careful we are. Manual data entry will have errors, which can demand credits and refunds to rectify with customers. Financial discrepancies disrupt operations and can hurt your bottom line.
Unhappy clients: Is any customer happy with mistakes? Of course not. In fact, they make your life difficult and will spread the word. This can damage your company’s reputation, and that’s the last thing you need in a highly competitive industry where churn and attracting new customers is a problem.
Delays in reports and closing: People can only type so fast – and when the data entry piles up, delays start. And delays mean you can’t produce reports. Speedy closing cycles become a fairy tale no one believes in. Financial planning and decision-making become fairly impossible.
Revenue all over the place: CROs dream of stable revenue. But errors in data entry can create a kind of revenue limbo. You never know whether your numbers are right. It can impact your cash flow. Financial stability is a lot harder to maintain because forecasting is unreliable. How can you do your job of planning for future growth?
No revenue recognition: We all know what a pain revenue recognition can be. It’s hard to keep track of payments across months, especially when these can change at any given moment due to upselling, cross-selling, and scaling down. When revenue recognition is incomplete, you can’t assess your company’s financial health with the accuracy you need. Customer onboarding pushed back: Customers (especially the new ones!) want to start using your products and services as soon as possible. But if your team has stacks of numbers and contracts they have to get through, your customers will have to wait to be onboarded. That means lost business opportunities and higher churn.
Where’s the dough? Too much data entry means delayed payments. Your cash flow is disrupted, and your relationships with suppliers and partners can be at risk.
Your team is constantly annoyed: Considering you and your team are chained to desks manually entering all data, and suffering all these consequences, how can you all feel anything except chronic annoyance?
You’re all painting that Bridge. Day in, day out.
The thing is, no one should need to start their work with burning frustration tears or a deep, soul-searching if-I-can-just-get-through-today sigh.
Everyone in your team (and you!) deserve work that is exciting.
Work that puts your company on good footing. Work that uses your talents and vision.
Steps to stop the manual data tears
So how can the manual data entry woes be tackled?
There are actionable steps you can take to make life easier for you and your team:
Adopt guidelines everyone understands: When the processes and rules are clear, people know what they’re doing. What types of operating procedures do you want? What expectations are important to you? Does everyone have detailed instructions? The clearer everything is, the smaller the risk of costly mistakes.
Train everyone involved: A well-trained team will have the necessary skills and knowledge to input data as fast as possible. They’ll better learn to double-check for accuracy, learn shortcuts and hacks, best practices for data entry, and become aware of the most common errors. The more competent your team, the fewer mistakes. Invest in software: There are many software solutions available today that can automate data entry tasks. These tools use technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning to capture, interpret, and input data. It cuts down the risk of human error, but it also speeds up the data entry process. Furthermore, these tools can integrate with other systems, ensuring that data is consistently accurate across your entire organization.
Updates: Nothing in IT Services stays still for long. Tech changes. If your team keeps up-to-date with the best strategies and system upgrades, they’ll have a useful advantage that makes them more efficient.
Audits at regular intervals: Audits give a good idea of how accurate your data is. Routinely check and verify your data to find and rectify mistakes. And importantly, audits will help you catch if there are patterns or common denominators in mistakes that you can solve. This knocks down the disruption.
The Painter
We get that the list is a lot of work- even more time and resources. You might even feel more overwhelmed than before.
But we’ve got good news. First, a question.
Imagine you’re the head of the Golden Gate Bridge painting team. Someone comes to you with a machine – a self-painter – that would take care of all the soul-sapping, costly and boring painting for you forever.
The machine’s proven to work. It runs itself. And it would let you do the things you want to do – making sure the finances are alright, maybe working with marketing and sales to publicize, strategize new revenue streams, and generally keep the stakeholders happy.
You’d take it, right?
That’s what automation can do for your exhausting data entry woes.
Automation gets rid of the tedium of all those repetitive tasks. The potential for mistakes plummets. Time is freed up. No more damage control.
Automation doesn’t just make your operations more efficient. It changes things for you and your team.
- It’s empowering, boosting morale and productivity
- It enhances customer satisfaction, which brings in both short-term and long-term revenue
- It strengthens financial standing with revenue recognition and timely reports
It can all be yours
Yes, manual data entry can be as discouraging as painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it can be for the most part eliminated.
Why not give you and your team the gift of profitability and excitement about your job? Why not allow you and your team to realize your own potential and the potential of your company?
The painter’s waiting.
The average cost of manually processing one invoice is $15.
-Levvel Research
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