Calculator · 2 minutes
What the current mess costs you
Nobody budgets for reconciliation. It is already in the payroll, so it never appears as a line item and never gets a decision. This puts a number on it using six figures you already know.
Every figure here is your own number multiplied by another of your own numbers, and the multiplication is printed next to the answer. There is no benchmark on this page and no comparison with anyone else, because we would have to make it up.
Your figures, annualised
AED 285,600
a year, in reconciliation time and rework. This is arithmetic on the numbers you typed — not a benchmark, not an estimate of what other companies spend, and not a claim that all of it is recoverable.
Reconciliation time, per year
AED 165,600
6 people × 5 hrs × 46 weeks × AED 120 = AED 165,600
Rework, per year
AED 120,000
12 events × AED 2,500 = AED 30,000 a quarter × 4 = AED 120,000
Hours spent reconciling, per year
1,380 hrs
6 × 5 = 30 hrs a week × 46 weeks = 1,380 hrs
Days a year the month is not closed
120 days
10 days × 12 months = 120 of 230 working days
What this does not include: the decisions taken late because the numbers were not ready, the customers who did not come back after the second corrected invoice, and the people who left. Those are real and we are not going to put a figure on them for you.
What these numbers say
6 people at 5 hours a week is 30 hours every week spent making two systems agree. Over 46 working weeks that is 1,380 hours — the equivalent of 0.8 full-time people, if a full-time week is 40 hours. Nobody hired those people to do that. It accumulated.
At AED 120 an hour that time costs AED 165,600 a year. The cost is already in your payroll, which is exactly why it never appears on a budget line and never gets a decision.
A close that takes 10 days runs 120 days a year, out of 230 working days — 52% of the year in which last month's position is still moving. Every decision taken in that window is taken on a number that is not yet final.
12 rework events last quarter at AED 2,500 each is AED 30,000 a quarter. Annualised on the assumption that last quarter was ordinary, that is AED 120,000. If last quarter was unusually good, the figure is low.
Together: AED 285,600 a year, before anything that cannot be counted.
Six things to do, in this order
None of these needs a benchmark, a vendor or a budget. They need a week and somebody willing to write things down.
- 01
Log the copies for one week
Ask each of the 6 people to write one line every time they move a number from one system to another: which number, from where, to where, how long. One week is enough. The list is almost always shorter and more repetitive than anyone expects.
- 02
Name one owner per number
Go down that list and write the single system that should hold each number. Where two systems hold it, one of them is a copy, and the copy is what somebody is paid to maintain by hand.
- 03
Remove the most expensive copy first
Order the list by hours, not by how annoying it is. At AED 120 an hour the top item is the one worth engineering out, even when it is not the one people complain about.
- 04
Write down what you are waiting for on each of the 10 days
A close is a queue. Put a name and a document against every day of it. Days that are waiting for a number somebody is re-keying belong to the list above; days that are waiting for a decision are a different problem and need a different fix.
- 05
Give the last 12 rework events a one-line cause
Not a category — a sentence. "The price on the order was not the price on the contract." Causes repeat. Two or three sentences will cover most of the events, and those are the controls worth building.
- 06
Re-run this page in ninety days
Same inputs, same assumptions. If the hours have not moved, whatever was changed was not the constraint. This is the only benchmark that means anything, because it is you against you.
If you would rather not do it alone
A written diagnosis does the first three steps with you and tells you which of them is actually your constraint. That is a different thing from a calculator, and it is the only thing that produces a real number.
Want someone to read this with you?
Ten answers cannot see your data, your contracts, or the person who quietly refuses to use the system. Send them over and a consultant will come back with what they mean for a company your size, and what we would look at first. No newsletter, no sequence — one reply from a person.
Cost of Chaos
You now have a number. The next question is which part of it is fixable
Not all of it is. Tell us how the figure came out and we will tell you which line we would go after first, and which one is just the cost of the business you are in.
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