Every day, businesses lose millions to a problem so familiar it's become invisible. Here's what the research actually tells us—and what we're doing about it.
Picture this: Sarah, a finance manager at a mid-sized company, spends her Tuesday morning hunting for a single invoice. She checks email, then the shared drive, then asks three colleagues. Forty minutes later, she finds it—in someone's personal folder. Meanwhile, the CFO is making budget decisions based on a spreadsheet with a formula error nobody's caught yet.
This isn't a horror story. It's Tuesday.
McKinsey tracked knowledge workers for months and found something startling: we lose one full day every week just looking for information. Not analyzing it. Not using it. Just finding it.
When Ardent Partners analyzed over 1,000 accounts payable departments, they discovered companies processing invoices manually were spending $12.88 per invoice and taking 17 days to complete the cycle. Companies that went digital? $2.78 and 3 days. Same work. 78% less cost. 82% less time.
But here's the kicker: When researchers at EuSpRIG actually audited operational spreadsheets—the ones running real businesses—they found errors in 94% of them. Not typos. Formula errors. The kind that compound.
Remember JPMorgan's "London Whale" losses? $6 billion traced back partly to spreadsheet errors in risk models. The U.S. Senate investigated. Excel didn't.
Source: Ardent Partners, 'State of ePayables 2024'
Let's say you have 100 employees. If McKinsey's research holds (and it usually does), that's 20-25 people's worth of productivity just... gone. Searching. Recreating. Asking around. That's not counting the errors, the missed deadlines, or the decisions made on bad data.
Gartner puts a number on it: $12.9 million per year in losses from poor data quality alone. For the average organization. Not a worst-case scenario. Average.
Some companies try the 'best tool for every job' approach. CRM here, accounting software there, project management somewhere else. Sounds smart until you realize your team now spends half their day switching between systems and copy-pasting data around. You didn't solve the problem—you just digitized it.
Others build custom solutions. Two years and three developers later, they have software that almost works, but the requirements have changed and the lead developer just left for Google.
Most try to fix one department at a time. AP goes digital! Success! Except now they're emailing CSVs to Finance, who's pasting them into... you guessed it, spreadsheets. The islands just moved from paper to pixels.
When we started building Praxsuite, we had one rule: if data has to jump between systems, we've already lost. Not integrations. Not APIs. One system. One database. One source of truth.
Universal search across everything. Customer records, invoices, projects, emails—all in one place. Our clients report 93% less time searching. That's reclaiming about 2 hours per person, per day.
Data flows automatically. Sales closes a deal, Finance sees the revenue, Inventory adjusts stock. No exports. No imports. No wondering if everyone's looking at the same numbers.
Governed workflows with audit trails. Every change logged, every calculation traceable. Meets KPMG and PRA guidance without the bureaucracy that usually comes with compliance.
Intelligent automation. OCR extracts invoice data, workflows route approvals, alerts notify the right people. The Ardent benchmark improvements? We're hitting them.
Composite data from mid-sized client implementations (100-500 employees)
These aren't projections. This is what our clients report after implementation:
To payback
Based on time and cost savings
Average annual savings
Mid-sized organizations (100-500 employees)
Less time searching
From 2.5 hours/day to minutes
Technology's only half of it. The other half is not screwing up the rollout. Here's our process:
Discovery workshops with your team. Where do you lose time? What processes cost the most? Which data gaps create the biggest risks? We map it all out with actual numbers.
No forcing your workflow into our boxes. We adapt Praxsuite to how you actually work. Then we migrate your data—cleaned, validated, and structured properly.
Not just "here's where to click." We explain why it matters. Role-specific training. Internal champions. The stuff that makes people actually use it.
Phased rollout. Real-time support. Monthly reviews. We track the KPIs we promised in discovery and adjust until we hit them. This isn't a "good luck" handoff.
Free diagnostic assessment. We'll quantify your specific pain points and show you the numbers. No commitment. No sales pitch. Just data.