Why companies still copy data between systems by hand, and how to change it

Take a hypothetical distribution company with 90 employees. Every morning a salesperson retypes orders from emails into the sales system. A warehouse worker exports stock levels to Excel and compares them with the online shop system. Someone in HR enters a new employee’s details into three different programs.

None of these people has “retyping data” in their job description. In a work report they will write “order handling” or “HR matters”. So the management board hears that the team is busy, but does not know with what.

Some of these tasks have disappeared by themselves. Since 1 April 2026 most Polish companies have issued invoices in KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System, so recipients get them as structured data rather than PDFs to retype. In many companies, however, plenty of other places remain where someone copies data by hand. The most common are:

The simplest way is a one-week exercise in a single department. Each person records what they do to the nearest quarter of an hour, with no judgement and no reporting to managers. After a week the team adds up the time in a few categories: customer contact, analysis, meetings, retyping data, other.

From the result it is easy to calculate the annual cost: hours per week × number of working weeks × hourly labour cost including overheads. Say four people each spend 5 hours a week retyping data. With 46 working weeks a year and a cost of PLN 70 an hour, that is 20 × 46 × 70, or PLN 64,400 a year.

Plug in your own figures and you get an amount that is easy to compare with the cost of automation. Do not add hard-to-prove “lost opportunities” to it. A cautious figure will persuade the management board more effectively than an impressive one.

This is the most common and the most genuine reason. To automate a process, someone has to describe it, collect the exceptions and talk to the supplier and the management board. That is a few hours of work nobody has, because their whole day is filled with the retyping itself.

The manager has no time either, because they are solving day-to-day problems. The management board is busy with sales and finance. The issue is carried over from quarter to quarter, and after three years the process is still manual.

Only a management board decision breaks this loop. A simple one is enough: this quarter, one person from the department spends a few hours a week on automation, and their other tasks are reassigned accordingly. Without such a decision, good intentions are not enough.

To many management boards, RPA (robotic process automation – software that operates systems the way a person at a computer would) suggests expensive platforms for large corporations. In companies that work on Microsoft 365 the entry point is much lower. You do, however, need to understand clearly what is free and what requires a licence – the table below summarises this.

The most common misunderstanding concerns how the robot is started. A robot in the free version runs when the employee starts it themselves on their own computer. If it is to start by itself, at a fixed time or when an email arrives, you need a Premium licence. If it is to work without a person at the computer, you need a Process licence.

Building a simple robot does not require programming, because it involves arranging steps in an editor and recording clicks. You do, however, need someone who thinks logically and understands the process. Without them, the robot will handle the typical cases, and the exceptions will land back on people’s desks.

Some companies have already tried robots and ended up disappointed. The story was usually similar: a few robots built by an outside firm, nobody looking after them, the first change in a system – and the robots stopped working. What remained was the belief that “RPA doesn’t work”.

These failures mostly have organisational causes. A robot works reliably for as long as the systems it uses look the same. Every software update, change of screen layout or new file format requires the robot to be reviewed. This is not a flaw but a regular part of maintenance that has to be planned.

If your company has had a failed project, do not start again in the same way. Find out why the robots stopped working, and start with one process on a stable system, with a responsible person from day one.

Automation often gets passed back and forth between departments. The IT department says the business department has to describe the process. The business department waits for IT to configure something. Six months later the matter is exactly where it was.

What helps is one named person responsible for the first process – not a committee or a whole team. Ideally this is the manager of the department the process belongs to, with a goal set for the quarter and backing from the management board. A technical specialist, internal or external, provides the know-how, while this person makes the decisions and knows the exceptions.

A robot that clicks through screens is a good solution, but not always the first one. Many retyping problems can be removed more cheaply and more durably.

Copying by hand is also sometimes simply sensible. If a process happens once a month and takes a quarter of an hour, automation will not pay for itself. The same applies when the system is due to be replaced soon, or when each transfer requires a judgement that cannot be written as a rule. In other cases, check the options in the list below in turn.

Above all, the first project should teach the company how to work with automation: who looks after it, who reports changes and how to measure the effect. Saving time matters, but this knowledge will be useful for every subsequent process. The steps below lead from measurement to a working robot: