What's actually costing SMEs the most time?
We're running ongoing research into where manual processes cost small and midsize businesses the most: time, money, errors and where custom technology realistically pays off.
Purpose of this research
Most advice about “digital transformation” is written for enterprises with dedicated IT teams and large budgets. This research is focused specifically on UK SMEs, building an honest, practical picture of where custom technology is worth the investment and where it isn't.
What we're finding so far
Across the SMEs we talk to, the same pattern keeps showing up: work that should take minutes stretches into hours because it still runs through phone calls, spreadsheets and manual re-entry between systems that don't talk to each other. That matches the UK data too: a July 2026 survey of 1,000 UK micro, small and medium-sized business owners, run by American Express with Small Business Saturday UK, found they spend an average of 11 hours a week on admin and finance-related tasks (around six working days a month), nearly twice what they spend on sales and business development (3.6 days a month). And 54% said paperwork gets in the way of running their business.
A similar pattern shows up elsewhere too: in the US, a 2024 survey of 630 small business owners and executives found manual data entry and reconciling information across different apps eats an average of 25 hours a week, with 91% saying it undermines their productivity.
Where the time actually goes, industry by industry
Reliable, industry-specific research at this level of detail is scarce. A lot of what circulates online turns out to be marketing content citing surveys that don't actually exist. What's below is an honest mix of the data above and the patterns we consistently see scoping projects in each industry, not a formal, industry-by-industry study.
Home Services
Scheduling and dispatch are still coordinated by phone for a lot of independent trades businesses: a technician's day gets built and rebuilt over calls and texts instead of a shared board. Call volume isn't slowing down either. Almost a third of privately rented homes in England (32%) were built before 1919 and older housing stock generally means more repairs, not fewer, according to the government's 2024 English Housing Survey.
Retail
For small multi-location retailers, the recurring time sink is inventory reconciliation: keeping stock counts consistent between a point-of-sale system and an online store when the two aren't connected usually means someone manually checking and adjusting numbers at the end of each day, or discovering the mismatch only after a customer has already bought something that wasn't actually in stock.
Professional Services
Client onboarding at firms like accounting practices and consultancies is still commonly run through email: documents requested one at a time, chased individually and tracked in an inbox rather than a shared checklist. The bottleneck usually isn't any single document. It's the back-and-forth needed to collect all of them.
Real Estate
Maintenance requests for rental properties typically arrive through a mix of phone calls, texts and emails, with no single record of what was reported, assigned, or resolved. That makes a simple question hard to answer: how many requests are open right now and how long has each one been waiting?
Hospitality
Ordering between restaurants and their suppliers still runs largely on phone calls: a kitchen calls in an order, a supplier confirms it verbally and neither side has a shared, live record of what was actually agreed. When an order is wrong or late, resolving it means another phone call rather than simply checking its status.
Logistics
For smaller logistics and delivery operations, shipment status often lives in whichever system last touched it: a driver's text, a dispatcher's spreadsheet, a customer's email. Reliably knowing where a shipment actually is usually means checking several places by hand rather than one shared source of truth.
Download the current research brief
A short PDF summarising findings so far, updated as the research progresses.
Research archive & sources
Past briefs and the third-party research we cite, kept in one place as it grows.
- Download
Research brief — August 2026
August 2026 · Document