Every order that came into this company arrived once and was typed four times. Into the web store’s back office. Into the accounting package. Into the warehouse sheet. Into the courier’s portal. Four keyboards, four chances to mistype a postcode, four versions of the truth.
Where the time actually went
Nobody had ever added it up. The owner guessed “maybe an hour a day.” We watched one ordinary Tuesday and counted: two hours and forty minutes, spread across three people, none of whom thought of it as work worth mentioning. It was just how orders are done here.
The worse cost wasn’t the typing. It was the checking — the Friday ritual of finding which of the four systems disagreed with the others, and which one was right.
The most expensive part of double entry is never the entry. It’s the doubt.
What we built
Not a platform. A bridge: a small service that listens for a paid order at one end and, within a minute, has written it — once, correctly, with an audit trail — into the other three.
What it gave back
The Friday ritual is gone. The three people got their hours back — one of them now runs the customer follow-up program that never used to happen. And the postcode errors dropped to zero, because the postcode is only ever typed once, by the customer.
The bridge has run unattended since the week it shipped. It sends one email a month: a summary nobody strictly needs, kept only because it feels good to read.