The task that stopped being a task

Handling direct debits took the administration team around five hours, twice a month. Several spreadsheets had to be cross-checked by hand and the identifiers for every point of sale corrected one by one, because the bank matches each debit on an exact combination of tax ID, bank account and point of sale: a single customer changing accounts or ownership was enough to break the match.

With a hundred customers that was an afternoon. With more than two thousand it was some 120 hours a year — three full working weeks, every year, spent reconciling spreadsheets.

A web application where the administrator uploads the spreadsheets and, two minutes later, receives by email the files ready to load into the bank’s system and process the collection.

What made the replacement possible was not the coding: it was measuring first what the task actually cost. The problem was never the administrator or the spreadsheet — it was a procedure designed for a company size that had ceased to exist.

The task ceased to exist. In time, some 120 hours a year freed up; in money, a large share of one person’s salary devoted to a single task that added nothing to the business.