Free tool
What is copying data by hand actually costing you?
Pick the systems your team copies data between. Enter how much you re-key and what an hour of that time costs. You get the annual dollar figure and the reconciliation hours it eats, worked out live as you type. No email required to see your result.
Which systems do you copy data between?
Your industry (optional, narrows the list)
Tap the systems you re-key between by hand. Pick at least two.
Select two or more systems to continue.
How much do you re-key?
Adjust these to match your team. The cost updates as you go.
Each invoice, contact, job or row someone types from one system into another.
Find it, copy it, paste it, check it. Be honest about the checking.
Wages plus on-costs for whoever does the copying. A bookkeeper sits around 45 to 65.
That works out to roughly
$0 per year
0 hours of staff time spent copying data.
How we worked this out
The most expensive hand-off in your stack
Your stack
Send this to whoever signs off
Or save the card to paste into a deck or an email
Nothing you enter leaves your browser unless you ask for the emailed brief. The figure is computed on your device, and the share link only carries the systems and figures you entered.
How much does manual data entry cost?
The cost of manual data entry is the staff time spent copying records from one system into another, multiplied by what that time is worth. Take the records re-keyed each week, the minutes each one takes to find, copy, paste and check, and the loaded hourly cost of the person doing it. Fifty records a week at four minutes each is over 170 hours a year, more than four full work-weeks, before you count the reconciliation time spent chasing the figures that did not match. The calculator above does this sum for your real numbers.
The most expensive part is rarely the typing. It is the reconciliation: the hours spent finding why the total in one system does not agree with the other, because a number was keyed wrong or keyed twice. The more systems in the loop, the more hand-offs, and every hand-off is a place a figure can drift.
The hand-offs we see most
Some pairings come up again and again. These are the ones teams most often copy between by hand.
- Client and invoice data copied between Xero and Practice Manager every billing run.
- Matter and trust figures re-keyed from LEAP into MYOB at month end.
- Client holdings and fees reconciled between Xplan and the HUB24 platform by hand.
- Jobs and timesheets retyped between field software and the back office.
- Deals and contacts copied from HubSpot into Xero when a sale closes.
- Numbers exported to a spreadsheet, worked, then typed back into Xero.
The number is only ever as good as your inputs, and that is the point: it is your cost, not a figure we made up. A one-time integration between the systems removes most of the manual copying, so the data flows once and the reconciliation goes away. That is the work we do. See how we connect systems.