Use cases / Stop re-keying
Use case
The same order, typed into three systems.
Every business runs on more than one system. The problem is rarely the systems — it's the person in the middle, retyping the same details from one into the next, and catching the typos a week later.
The same postcode, keyed three times.
The order arrives by email. Someone types it into the accounts package. Then again into the CRM. Then again into the courier's portal. If any of the three fumbles a digit, it's a wrong delivery and a phone call to sort out later. It crept in one system at a time: each tool arrived for a good reason, and the person in the middle became the integration.
The usual advice is discipline — be more careful, double-check the entry. But care doesn't remove a step that shouldn't exist; it just polices it. The fix is to take the step away.
How it actually works.
- We map the round-trip. Every place a piece of data is entered by hand, and everywhere it's needed after that. Usually there are more hops than anyone expects.
- We wire the systems together — through whatever each one offers: a proper API, a scheduled file, or even the email it already sends. Entered once, it lands everywhere it's needed, in the right shape.
- The plumbing looks after itself. It renews its own credentials, retries when a system is briefly down, and only ever asks a person about the one record that genuinely can't be matched — not the ninety-nine that can. That's what separates a monitored integration from a stray zap that fails silently and sits broken for weeks.
- You get one source of truth. Change an address in one place and it's right everywhere — instead of right in one system and stale in three.
Where we've done it
Twenty-plus systems, one flow.
This is bread-and-butter for us — years of wiring business systems together across very different industries, so the connections hold when a supplier changes an API or a token expires overnight. The clearest example: a UK firm's entire operating platform, where more than twenty separate systems — accounting, banking, documents, comms, filing — run as one flow, monitored so they stay connected.
What module one looks like.
We don't wire everything at once. Module one is usually the worst offender — the single hand-off that causes the most retyping and the most mistakes.
One hand-off, gone
We connect those two systems first, prove the data flows cleanly both ways, and your team stops retyping it — live in about a month, not a year. Then we take the next hand-off, and the next.
What it costs you.
Re-keying has a real price, but it isn't a number anyone can hand you off the shelf — it depends on your data and your wages, and the only figure worth trusting is the one you measure yourself. So we built a small tool that does exactly that: time one loop of the retyping, and it prices the year at published ONS wages, employer costs included.
Work out what re-keying costs you →Most firms are surprised it comes out at the scale of a salary — the same data typed four times adds up faster than anyone expects.
Not sure this is the one to fix first? The 20-question self-audit ranks your processes — free, two minutes, no email →Where this goes next
- What re-keying actually costs a UK small business → — the numbers, and why the famous ones are junk.
- The re-keying calculator → — time one loop, get your own figure.
- Who it's for → — the shapes of business this fits.
Start here
Start with the worst hand-off.
A free process audit is thirty minutes. Show us where your team retypes the most, and you'll leave with a written map of how it could flow on its own — whether or not we ever work together.
No pitch deck, no obligation. The map is yours either way.