Why “We’ll Fix It Later” Never Works in 2026
A New Year wake-up call for Finance and RevOps leaders who want scale without chaos
January and February create a particular kind of optimism. It is the month where every number feels possible again. Targets get agreed, revenue forecasts get polished, and teams promise themselves that this year they will operate with more clarity, fewer fighting fires, and a tighter grip on performance.
It is also the month where many businesses quietly decide to carry a fragile truth into the year ahead: that the revenue engine still depends on manual work.
Not because they want it to. Because it “sort of works.”
If you ask most growing companies how revenue operations function beneath the surface, you will hear some familiar phrases: “We export it.” “We reconcile it.” “We check it manually.” “We fix it at month-end.” “We have got a spreadsheet for that.”
It is rarely framed as a systemic issue. It is framed as an operational reality. Something to manage. Something to tidy later.
But that “later” never comes.
Manual revenue work behaves like debt. It grows. It compounds. It hides itself until the exact moment leadership needs certainty. And by that stage, it is no longer a task list. It is a permanent tax on growth.
This article is about that tax and how manual revenue operations quietly steal time, trust, and momentum, and why the cost gets dramatically worse as soon as the business starts scaling.
Manual work doesn’t feel expensive. That’s why it wins.
The most dangerous thing about manual finance processes is that they appear harmless when viewed in isolation.
A finance analyst spends ten minutes checking the payment status of a customer. A RevOps manager exports invoice data to support a renewal conversation. Someone adjusts a formula because the dataset changed. Another person updates the same spreadsheet with slightly different numbers because their export was pulled at a different moment in time.
Each action seems small. Each one feels rational. Often, each one is genuinely helpful in the moment.
But manual work does not remain small. It is not linear. It multiplies, because manual work is not merely performing tasks, it is repairing broken structure.
And broken structure is one of the few things that reliably expands over time.
This is why businesses can start the year thinking they will be fine, then arrive in April wondering why their finance team is permanently drowning.
Spreadsheet culture is a scale problem, not a competence problem
Most businesses do not use spreadsheets because they are naive. They use them because spreadsheets are fast, flexible, and accessible. They can be spun up in minutes, and they often make problems feel solvable.
The trouble begins when spreadsheets stop being a tool for analysis and become a substitute for systems.
Academic research has demonstrated for decades that spreadsheet errors are common and non-trivial. Raymond Panko’s widely cited work on spreadsheet errors highlights that error rates are high enough that most large spreadsheets will contain errors — not because teams are careless, but because error is an expected property of complex human logic at scale.
This is a critical point for leaders: error in spreadsheets is not a possibility to manage, it is a probability to assume.
Spreadsheets were never designed to hold the operational weight that modern revenue operations place on them. Yet in many organisations, spreadsheets become the bridge between the CRM and the finance system, the mechanism for revenue reporting, and the “truth layer” leadership relies on.
That is not resilience. That is organisational risk wearing a friendly user interface.
Data quality problems have a real, measurable cost — and it’s not small
There is an idea that manual work might be inefficient, but acceptable. That it may slow teams down, but not harm the business.
That is comforting. It is also wrong.
Gartner has repeatedly quantified the cost of poor data quality, estimating that it costs organisations $12.9 million per year on average.
This figure matters because most manual revenue processes directly create data quality problems. Not necessarily by introducing incorrect data, but by generating inconsistent data, stale data, and untrusted data. They are the exact conditions that make decision-making slow and contested.
Manual processes create multiple versions of truth by definition. Two teams export at different times. Two people adjust differently. A customer record changes after export. The systems drift. Then the business spends time debating rather than deciding.
This is where manual revenue work becomes strategic damage, not operational inconvenience.
The manual close steals finance capacity from higher-value work
One of the cleanest ways to see the impact of manual processes is to examine month-end close.
Close is where all revenue reality collides: what Sales thinks happened, what Finance can confirm, and what leadership needs to report with confidence.
When close is heavily manual, Finance becomes an organisational bottleneck. The books take longer to finalise, leadership decisions slow down, and the business spends more days per month operating without trusted data.
FloQast, a well-known close management platform, notes that traditional close processes can take up to 10 days (and in many cases longer), leaving leaders without the numbers they need to make key decisions.
Even more revealing is what happens inside the finance function: manual close work can consume significant time and attention. FloQast has also stated that outdated manual close processes can take up as much as 40% of finance departments’ monthly working time and attention.
Think about what that implies.
If your finance team is spending close to half its time reconciling and confirming what happened, there is limited capacity left for what leadership actually needs from finance: forecasting, scenario planning, risk management, pricing insight, and strategic performance work.
Manual revenue operations don’t just waste time. They steal the best work finance teams could be doing.
The New Year lie: “We’ll fix it later” is how manual becomes permanent
Most leaders understand that manual processes are not ideal. They often intend to modernise. They just don’t prioritise it.
The reason is subtle: manual work creates the illusion that systems are performing.
Teams close the books. Numbers go out. Dashboards update. Customers get billed. Revenue is reported. It looks like success.
But what is actually happening is human compensation at scale. People are acting as the integration layer between systems. They are reconciling contexts that should never have been lost. They are acting as verification for numbers that shouldn’t require verification.
This creates a dangerous feedback loop. The more people compensate, the less urgent the fix feels. The less urgent the fix feels, the more manual work grows. Then the organisation becomes dependent on the workarounds, and modernising starts to feel risky.
That is how “fix it later” becomes “this is how we operate.”
By the time a business truly decides to invest, the pain is no longer limited to Finance. It spreads into Sales velocity, retention operations, customer experience, and leadership confidence.
The real killer isn’t mistakes, it’s time wasted searching for the truth
Manual revenue work creates another hidden cost: time spent hunting for information.
In the wider data world, research and commentary have repeatedly highlighted that professionals lose enormous time preparing, searching, and cleaning data rather than using it for insight.
IDC has described an environment where 80% of time is spent on data discovery, preparation, and protection, and only 20% on actual analytics, with wasted time including up to 12 hours per week because people cannot find, prepare, or protect data.
Although this is broader than finance, it mirrors exactly what happens in revenue teams running manual processes. Instead of teams using data to drive decisions, they spend their time:
Looking for the right export. Confirming which version is the latest. Checking whether the invoice status is current. Reconciling whether a payment happened. Investigating why one report differs from another.
That work produces no growth. It merely restores confidence.
And restoring confidence manually is one of the worst uses of senior time in any company.
Manual revenue work creates “trust decay” and the slowest killer of growth
The most expensive thing manual processes create is not labour cost. It is trust decay.
Trust decay starts when numbers differ across systems (sounds familiar?). It grows when finance reports are repeatedly corrected. It accelerates when Sales loses confidence in visibility and begins building its own shadow reporting. It peaks when leadership asks, in a meeting, the most dangerous question in business:
“Which number should we believe?”
At that point, the organisation shifts from velocity to caution.
Decisions slow down. Risk-taking declines. Forecast confidence drops. People begin hedging statements, because accountability is hard when data is contested.
No one writes “trust decay” into the budget. Yet it can shape an entire year’s performance.
This is exactly why New Year is the right time to address it. January is where trust is assumed. Q2 is where trust is tested. By Q4, most businesses either operate with aligned systems or with permanent organisational friction.
What scalable revenue operations actually looks like
Manual work will always exist in finance. That isn’t the goal. The goal is to stop manual work being the foundation.
At scale, the business needs revenue systems that preserve structure, context, and timeliness. It needs Sales and Finance looking at the same customer reality at the same moment, without Slack threads, exports, or spreadsheet archaeology.
This is why the most important shift in modern revenue operations is bringing financial truth and clarity to where decisions happen.
And for many businesses, decisions happen in Salesforce.
Why Breadwinner eliminates the manual tax
Breadwinner exists to eliminate the manual tax created when systems don’t align.
It does this by keeping financial data:
Consistent across systems, not duplicated across documents. Real-time, not delayed and re-exported. Structured, not flattened into rows with lost context.
When invoice and payment reality lives inside Salesforce, something powerful happens: Sales stops guessing. Finance stops translating. Leadership stops debating the numbers.
Manual work doesn’t disappear. But it becomes what it should always have been: exception-handling, not core infrastructure.
In other words, Breadwinner doesn’t just make processes faster. It makes the organisation more certain.
And certainty scales better than effort.
The New Year takeaway
Every business starts the year with targets.
The ones that hit them are not always the ones with the best products or the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the least internal friction or the ones where teams can move quickly because they trust the same truth.
Manual revenue operations are friction. They are in debt. They are a slow tax on speed.
They do not get better with time. They get heavier. So if there is one finance resolution worth making this year, it is not “close faster” or “report more frequently.”
It is this:
- Stop relying on heroics to produce truth.
- Because growth doesn’t reward heroics.
- It rewards systems.
