The same order gets typed in three times

It arrives by email. Someone copies it into a spreadsheet to keep track, then a third time into the accounts to invoice it. Every copy is a chance to get it wrong — and nobody could tell you which of the three versions is the one that counts.

What you see

• A customer asks where their order stands. It takes two internal calls to answer them.
• The tracking spreadsheet carries the first name of whoever created it, and a column nobody dares delete any more.
• The invoice goes out with a price that is no longer the quoted one, and nobody knows when it changed.
• The stock on screen is never quite the stock on the floor. Someone checks with the workshop before promising a date.
• When the person who keeps the spreadsheet is away, the chain stops.

What is actually going on

The problem is not the typing. It is that no single place is authoritative. Each tool holds a piece of the file and none holds the file: the email carries the commercial commitment, the spreadsheet carries progress, the accounts carry the money. The three drift apart from the first change onwards, because nothing forces them to talk to one another.

What builds up around that is not negligence, it is compensation. Someone becomes the synchronisation point. That person knows column H has meant something different since March, that this supplier invoices by the carton and not by the unit, and that this file is a special case nobody touches. Those rules are sound. They are written down nowhere.

When we take on a chain like this, we do not start by writing code: we survey the real data. On one such handover, two columns were labelled “amount” and held quantities. The label had been wrong for years. Everyone had worked around it, and nobody remembered any more. That is the kind of thing no meeting turns up.

What it costs you

Double entry is visible: it is time, and time can be counted. The rest is less visible. A delivery date promised because nobody dared check. A discount granted twice. An invoice sent late because the order had shipped and nobody told the accounts department. None of these costs appears in a budget. All of them get paid.

How we go about it

We do not replace the chain in one go. We start with the link that hurts most — almost always the one where the order changes hands — and switch it over while everything else keeps running. Your current tool is not turned off on go-live day: it is turned off the day nobody opens it any more.

Before that, a fixed-price scoping exercise produces a written perimeter and a budget, then a specification you read and correct. Nothing is coded before that. You know what you are buying before you buy it, and you remain free to stop there.

What you end up with

A single file that carries the order from quotation through to payment, and that everyone looks at. Its stages are dates, not tick boxes: when the delivery is recorded, the order moves to “ready to invoice” on its own. Nobody has to think about it, so nobody forgets.

And the rules that used to live in someone's head are written down, open to challenge, and changeable without calling us.

Where we have already seen this

The questions we get asked

The other situations

• Edge casesThe moment a case falls outside the rules, the front line improvises
• Business rulesYour business rules live in a spreadsheet nobody dares touch
• Platform ceilingYour application has hit the limits of its technology