The True Cost of Manual Data Entry Between Your ERP and Ecommerce Platform

We see it in almost every business we work with. Someone in the team — often in operations or finance — spends hours every day copying data between systems. Orders from Shopify into NetSuite. Inventory updates from the warehouse back to the webstore. Customer details from the CRM into the ERP. Invoice data from the ERP into the accounting tool.

It works. Until it doesn't. And even when it does work, it's costing you far more than you realise.

The obvious cost: time

Let's do some basic maths. Say your team spends 2 hours a day on manual data entry between systems. That's 10 hours a week, roughly 500 hours a year. At an average fully-loaded cost of $45 per hour for an operations person in Australia, that's $22,500 a year — just on copying data from one screen to another.

And that's a conservative estimate. We've worked with businesses where 3 or 4 people each spend part of their day on this. One retailer we spoke to had a team member whose entire role was essentially re-keying orders from their ecommerce platform into their ERP. That's a full salary dedicated to something a well-configured integration handles in seconds.

The time cost is real, but it's actually the smallest part of the problem.

The hidden cost: errors

Humans make mistakes. It's not a criticism — it's just reality. Studies consistently show manual data entry has an error rate of around 1-4%. That means for every 100 orders you manually key into your ERP, between 1 and 4 will have something wrong. A transposed digit in a quantity. A wrong SKU. A misspelled address. A missed line item.

Each of those errors has a downstream cost. A wrong quantity means a short shipment, a customer complaint, and a return to process. A wrong SKU means picking the wrong product, shipping costs to fix it, and inventory discrepancies. A misspelled address means a failed delivery and reshipment charges.

We worked with one business that traced a persistent inventory variance back to a single digit being transposed during manual stock updates. It had been happening for months. By the time they caught it, the inventory data was so unreliable they had to do a full physical stocktake — three days of warehouse downtime.

The cost of fixing errors almost always exceeds the cost of preventing them.

The strategic cost: speed

Manual data entry creates delays. If orders don't hit your ERP until someone manually enters them the next morning, you've lost half a day of processing time. In ecommerce, where customers expect fast shipping, that delay is a competitive disadvantage.

We see this particularly during peak periods. A business that handles 50 orders a day can manage manual entry. But when Black Friday hits and volume jumps to 500, the manual process becomes a bottleneck. Orders queue up, fulfilment slows down, and customers start getting frustrated.

Automated integrations process data in near real-time. An order placed at 2am is in your ERP by 2:01am, ready for the warehouse team when they start their shift. During peak periods, the same integration that handles 50 orders handles 5,000 — without anyone working overtime.

The morale cost: your team

This one doesn't show up on a spreadsheet, but it matters. Nobody enjoys manual data entry. It's repetitive, error-prone, and thankless. Your operations team didn't sign up to be human middleware between two software systems.

We've seen the difference it makes when teams are freed from manual entry. The same people who were spending hours on data transcription are now spending that time on analysis, process improvement, and customer service. Their job satisfaction goes up, and so does their output.

If you're struggling with retention in your operations team, look at how much of their time is spent on work that a machine should be doing.

What automation actually costs

An integration between your ecommerce platform and your ERP — say Shopify to NetSuite via Celigo — typically costs between $15,000 and $40,000 to set up properly, depending on complexity. The platform subscription runs around $500 to $2,000 per month.

Compare that to the manual cost: $22,500 per year in time alone, plus error correction costs, plus the speed and morale impacts. Most businesses see a return on investment within 6 to 12 months. After that, the integration is essentially saving you money every day it runs.

And unlike a manual process, an integration scales. Whether you're processing 50 orders a day or 5,000, the cost is the same.

Where to start

If you're currently doing manual data entry between systems, start by mapping what data moves between which systems, how often, and who does it. That gives you a clear picture of the cost and helps prioritise which integrations to build first.

Usually the highest-impact starting point is the order-to-ERP flow. Getting orders, customers, and inventory syncing automatically between your ecommerce platform and your ERP eliminates the biggest chunk of manual work and the most costly errors.

If you want help mapping out what automation would look like for your business, we're happy to walk through it. We've done this assessment enough times to give you a realistic picture of costs, timelines, and expected savings.