Guide · Manufacturing
Nobody has ever put a line on the profit and loss called assembling the weekly report. That is precisely why it survives for years. The work is invisible in the accounts, it is spread across a few people, and everyone has quietly accepted it as the cost of having the system you have.
Somebody exports, then fixes. The report begins with a download out of the ERP and continues with twenty minutes of widening columns, deleting header rows and correcting a date format. The export is nearly right, which is worse than being useless, because nearly right is what keeps a person doing it by hand forever.
Two files get combined. Something out of the ERP, something out of QuickBooks or a spreadsheet, pasted together in a third file. Every combination is a chance to paste into the wrong column.
One person owns it. When they are on holiday the report does not happen, or it happens badly. If you have ever delayed a decision because the person who builds the numbers was out, you already know what this costs.
It is stale before it is read. The numbers are from Friday, you are reading them Tuesday, and you are making Wednesday's decision on them.
Nobody fully trusts it. There is a figure everyone knows is slightly wrong, and a person who knows how to mentally adjust it. That knowledge lives in one head.
You stopped asking for a report you wanted. This is the expensive one. Somewhere along the way you decided a number was not worth the hassle of asking for, so you now run the business without it.
Guessing is what keeps this problem alive. The arithmetic is simple and worth doing properly.
Take the person who builds the report. Time them honestly for two weeks — not their estimate, the actual clock, including the fixing and the chasing and the second pass when a figure looks wrong. Multiply by their fully loaded hourly cost, which is their salary plus tax and benefits, generally about a third above the headline wage. Multiply by fifty-two.
A report that takes four hours a week and is built by somebody costing $35 an hour loaded is roughly $7,300 a year. Two such reports and you are over $14,000. That is before the cost of a decision made late, or made on a number that was wrong.
Do that sum before you talk to anyone about fixing it. If it comes to $1,200 a year, leave it alone. Not everything repetitive is worth automating and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
It does not mean replacing the ERP. Replacing a working ERP because the reporting is bad is like moving house because a tap drips. The system holds your history, your people know it, and the migration would cost more than every report you will ever run.
It does not mean a new reporting module from the vendor, usually. Those are priced per seat, they still require somebody to drive them, and they generally solve the export half of the problem while leaving the combining and the sending untouched.
It does not mean everyone learns a new tool. If the fix requires the person who currently makes the report to learn something, the fix will not survive their next holiday.
The build reads from the ERP directly rather than through an export. It applies the same corrections that person applies by hand, every time, without being asked. It combines the sources that need combining. Then it sends the finished thing on a schedule, to the people who need it, in the format they already read.
The person who used to build it looks at it instead. That is the whole change, and it is usually the difference between a report that describes last week and one that tells you something while you can still act on it.
For most small manufacturers this is a two to four week build, and it is the most common first project we do, because the time it takes is easy to measure and therefore easy to prove.
You are ready if you can name the report, name the person, and say roughly how long it takes them. That is genuinely all that is needed to work out whether it is worth doing.
You are not ready if the honest answer is that several people each spend an unclear amount of time on several overlapping reports and nobody is sure which ones still get read. That is a common situation and it is fixable, but the first job is finding out what is actually happening rather than automating a process nobody has looked at in five years.
The audit exists for exactly this. Thirty minutes walking through how the numbers get assembled, then a written list within five business days with hours per week and dollars per year against each item, and a fixed price to fix the ones worth fixing. Anything that is not worth fixing is marked leave it alone, in writing.
More guides: QuickBooks Desktop integration · Quoting off spreadsheets · Replace or build around
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