A week every quarter, gone: what a disconnected setup actually looks like
A little while ago we wrote a post – When systems start to feel messy, is it the software, or how it fits together? – about how to tell whether your software is the cause of your problems, or simply how it integrates.
In this post, we follow up with a real life example, showing just how poor integration can cause problems for businesses day to day.
The week that disappeared four times a year
AGPM is a property management company in Glasgow. They look after fees, repairs and maintenance costs across a large number of properties, each with its own arrangement – different owners, different tenants, costs split by different ratios. All things that make sense for the industry, but make fitting into off-the-shelf invoicing systems difficult.
The software they were using worked exactly as it had been built to, but unfortunately didn’t link together very well in the niche ways AGPM required. This resulted in staff picking up the slack at the end of every quarter.
Every quarter, two team members would spend the majority of a week producing and sending the invoices. Time had to be spent pulling figures together, working out who owed what based on the ratios and building, checking and emailing each invoice manually.
Every quarter, skilled members of staff were taking time out of their usual jobs to spend time copying, calculating and cross-checking. And yet if you asked those same staff members ‘what software do you need?’, they’d probably describe exactly what they were already using. And they would be right – that’s what leads people to believe that the effort they are putting in is just how things have to be.
Why this kind of thing hides so well
Disconnected systems can be hard to diagnose for a few reasons.
There is no explicit failure. If you look at it on a tool-by-tool basis, everything does actually work. The gaps are between the systems, meaning that they show up as a loss of people’s time, instead of as something going obviously wrong. And because you are already paying for your staff’s time, it feels free when they have to do additional work.
Over time, the people responsible for manually bridging the gap between systems become good at it, and stop noticing the work at all. It just becomes part of the job and new starters are taught it as the way things are done. The problem gets absorbed.
Continuing on as you are can seem like the safer option. Sure, things might take a while but the bits that do work work well and changing systems could be expensive and take time, only to leave you with more problems than when you started.
Manually bridging the gap and checking anything can feel reassuring. You think nothing will slip under the radar because you see everything that is entered, and this feels safer than relying on a computer to transfer the data behind the scenes.
The last point is interesting because although it’s widely accepted that manual bridging takes more time, what many don’t realise is that it is also the single most reliable place for mistakes to enter. Every time something is done manually, it opens the door for human error – a figure typed incorrectly, a cost split the wrong way or the wrong invoice sent. Each one small, but each comes with its own cost – apologies, corrections, trust.
What changed when the gaps closed
For AGPM, the fix wasn’t to completely overhaul their processes – the way they ran their business worked well – it was just a case of creating one system that tied them all together, allowing data to flow uninterrupted from start to finish.
It calculates the recurring and one-off fees automatically. It splits costs by tenant ratio. It generates and emails the invoices in a few clicks rather than a few days. And because the same numbers now come from one place, they can be confident that they are correct.
The week long invoicing ordeal at the end of each quarter became a short task. Two people got time back to focus on their actual jobs, four times each year. Errors that crept in previously through manual handling could no longer get in. And owners and tenants got a portal to see balances and raise requests, which took another layer of back-and-forth off the team entirely.
All of that was achieved simply by making sure the system worked as a whole.
How to tell if this is you
You don’t need an audit to spot the early signs. Ask yourself:
Is there a task that takes a person a long time, mostly made up of moving information from one place to another? Does any part of your month or quarter consistently “disappear” into preparation, reconciliation or chasing? Do important numbers need to be checked against a second source to be sure? And if one specific person were off for a fortnight, would a routine process be unable to happen?
If you find yourself nodding, then focussing on allowing your data to flow smoothly through the process could be the best way to save yourself time and money.
Our earlier piece walks through how to tell whether you need new software or better-connected software. If you’ve read that, recognised yourself, and you’re not quite sure where your own gaps are, that’s exactly what an operational audit is for – a fresh pair of eyes to map where the time’s actually going, with no obligation to do anything about it afterwards.
The week AGPM got back was always there. It was just hidden in the gaps.