A study from Brightpearl by Sage has polled over 1,000 businesses to analyse how many hours a week retailers are spending on administrative tasks.
Brightpearl found that on average, retailers spend 5.7 hours weekly, 24 hours and 38.6 minutes monthly, or approximately 296 hours and 32 minutes annually on tedious, manual tasks including maintaining and updating spreadsheets, managing invoices and billing, analysing sales reports, and stock replenishment.
Participants in the study labelled these as the most ‘despised’ manual jobs in retail and for good reason:
“The amount of admin we have to deal with in our work lives is immense. Retail businesses across the UK are really being suffocated by mundane tasks like order processing, invoicing, and inventory management. This is draining productivity, overwhelming staff, and stunting growth.”
Mark Hook, Product Marketing Director at Brightpearl
And the amount of administrative work continues to increase business wide too. Of those polled in the study, 66% of businesses said their admin work is increasing, to such an extent that 10 respondents actually admitted that they feel ‘totally overwhelmed’ by the amount of administrative work they have to do on a daily basis.
What are the top ten most tedious administrative tasks according to workers?
To put this into further perspective, the study also found that 29% of retail employees had to resort to taking annual leave in the hope of catching up on these tasks, which includes:
- Filing away/clearing out emails
- Logging data
- Updating databases and documents
- Anything involving spreadsheets
- Completing tax returns
- Financial administration
- Handling returns
- Managing payments and invoices
- Sales reports and performance metrics
- Inventory management and stock replenishment
Hook also added:
“People don’t realise this, but many repeatable, and, frankly, boring work tasks can be automated. Retailers should focus on automating everything from order fulfilment and returns, to inventory management, shipping, and tax. By automating repetitive tasks, retailers can save a significant amount of time and reduce the administrative headache they are facing, freeing up valuable time for businesses to focus on growth and innovation.
With so many online brands looking to reduce costs at pace, automation can also have a significant impact on overheads and can make fast growth much more manageable,” to such an extent that Brightpearl believes that businesses can save over 300 hours of administrative tasks through their retail operating system, allowing them to focus on other areas of their business to promote growth and innovation”.
Why automation is the solution
Founded in 2007, Brightpearl is a leading retail operating system, which replaces the traditional concepts of a traditional ERP; order, inventory or warehouse management system. Their innovative Automation Engine reduces human errors by 65% and labour costs by 50%. All in all, they help retailers ‘grow fearlessly’. Brightpearl was acquired by Sage in 2022 to combine ‘Sage Intacct and Brightpearl create a powerful new solution for retailers and wholesalers’.
If you’d like to learn more about the subject of automation, Brightpearl hosted a webinar with a couple of their customers, which you can register to watch here: https://events.goldcast.io/auth?eventID=6d4af62a-b407-44bc-a8c2-00430357909a
Stream’s first integration was with Brightpearl, which delivers a two-way integration for planning and completing deliveries for Brightpearl orders. Learn more about our Brightpearl integration here.
We hosted a ‘fireside chat’ with Brightpearl and children’s furniture wholesaler and distributor early in the year which covered, amongst other subjects, the benefits of automating tasks. Read more (and watch the full interview) here.
