What is the second copy costing you?
Four figures. You get the re-entry, the hours spent settling records that disagree, and what connecting the systems would remove.
THE SAME RECORD
How often do the copies disagree?
A SECOND OPINION
Which half would you attack first?
Send the two numbers with two facts about the business and we reply within one business day with where the connection goes.
The same record typed into a second system costs twice: the typing, and then the hours spent settling the copies that end up disagreeing. The second is larger and appears in no report. Connecting the systems removes the re-entry and most of the settling. The first entry stays.
Where the second copy costs you
The second entry
Every system holding the same record gets its own typing. Three systems is two extra entries per record, not one.
The copies that disagree
A share of them always do. Somebody has to find the pair, check both and decide which is right, and finding it takes longer than the typing did.
What connecting removes
The re-entry and most of the settling. The first entry stays, and any tool promising the whole number back is counting that one too.
What this does not price
The decision made on the wrong copy. A figure two systems disagree about is a figure nobody acts on quickly, and that delay fits in no calculator.
Why the typing is the cheaper half
Ask what duplicate data entry costs and the arithmetic looks simple. Records times minutes times a rate. Every calculator on this subject stops there, and the figure it returns is the smaller part of the answer.
Typing a record twice is a fixed, visible cost that rises with volume. The copies that drift apart are none of those things. They surface late, they surface as an argument about whose figure is right, and settling one takes longer than creating it did.
That grows with every system holding the record. A third system does not add a third of the work. It adds another full copy to keep in step with the first and another chance for the two to part ways.
The arithmetic below is on screen and every figure in it is a field you can change, because a number you cannot check is worth less than no number.
Questions we get
How do I count the records?
Count what gets created new in a week, not what is stored. A customer, a job, an invoice, a ticket. If two people create them, count both. The stored total is a different figure and it is not the one costing you every week.
Is three systems really three entries?
Usually not all three by hand. Some of it arrives by export, by a paste, or by a sync covering part of the record. Set the systems figure to the ones a person types into and the answer stays honest.
Why price the disagreements separately?
Because they behave differently and they lead to different work. Typing is steady and predictable. A record that has drifted has to be found first, and finding it is most of the cost. Adding the two together hides the one that gets worse.
What share of records disagree?
Nobody knows theirs until they check, so that setting is a range rather than a figure. Pull thirty records that live in two systems and compare them field by field. It takes an hour and it replaces the guess.
Does anything get sent anywhere?
No. It runs in your browser, nothing is transmitted and there is no sign up.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built