Insider
Navigating the Data Imperfections
We need to learn to thrive with Less-than-Perfect procurement Data.
The data your finance team needs already exists — it's just locked behind the wrong kind of work.
There is a specific kind of financial pain that never makes it into board presentations.
It is the Monday morning ritual of pulling CSVs from four different systems, copying them into a master spreadsheet, checking for duplicates, fixing formatting errors, and finally — sometimes by Wednesday — having something that looks like data you can trust.
This is not a people problem. Your finance team is capable. This is a connectivity problem. And it is costing you far more than you think.
The Strategic Insight Gap
The most alarming finding in recent CFO research is not about technology. It is about blindness.
54% of finance leaders say their organisation lacks the insights needed to make informed decisions — not because the data doesn't exist, but because it is trapped in systems that require manual extraction before anyone can look at it. AccountsIQ CFO Mindset Report, 2024.
At the same time, 85% of CFOs say data analytics is crucial for strategic decision-making — yet most still rely on exports and spreadsheets to produce it. Financial Executives Research Foundation / Eide Bailly, 2026 The ambition is there. The infrastructure is the obstacle.
The gap between what CFOs know they need and what they can actually access is not a skills gap or a budget gap. It is a plumbing gap. The ERP holds everything. Nobody has a live connection to it.
The Time Cost of Disconnected Systems
When finance teams cannot connect directly to their systems, they adapt — and the adaptation is expensive.Finance planning staff spend an average of 14 hours per week preparing ad hoc reports. Of that, 42% — roughly 6 hours every week — is pure data preparation: consolidating versions, checking errors, and manually inputting data. DataRails / CFO Dive, 200-CFO survey, 2022 That is 6 hours per person per week that produces zero insight. It simply moves data from one place to another, hoping nothing breaks on the way.
The cumulative toll is visible at the top. 85% of CFOs say they would need a six-day week to manage their current workload — and the primary driver is not decision volume but outdated systems and siloed data forcing manual workarounds at every step.AccountsIQ, 2024 And 37% of CFOs are dissatisfied with their overall output, with 31% describing their daily work as "constant spreadsheet jockeying" — a direct result of manual extraction replacing what should be a live feed. DataRails, 2022
The work that gets squeezed out is exactly the work that creates value: variance analysis, fraud detection, spend anomaly review, supplier renegotiation.
The Accuracy Problem Nobody Talks About
There is a second cost embedded in manual data work — one that is harder to see but potentially more damaging.
Manual financial data carries a 1–3% error rate per transaction. Every report built on manually extracted ERP data contains compounding inaccuracies before analysis even begins. Business Software Benchmark, 2025 In a dataset of 10,000 transactions, that is between 100 and 300 errors baked into every report your team produces. Multiply that across quarters, entities and consolidation cycles, and the compounding effect becomes material.
Decisions made on bad data are not just inefficient — they are directionally wrong. Duplicate payments slip through. Fraud indicators go undetected. Compliance violations accumulate quietly. None of this shows up in the export. All of it exists in the source system.
What Direct Connectivity Unlocks
The shift from manual extraction to direct system access is not an incremental improvement. It is a category change in what finance can do.Finance teams that switch to automated, direct-system data access report 40–60% time savings on data preparation tasks. Business Software Benchmark, 2025 For a team running 14-hour weekly report cycles, that is between 5 and 8 hours returned to actual analysis — every week, for every person on the team.
And the upside goes beyond reclaimed hours. 81% of CFOs identify "capturing, structuring and making better use of data" as their single greatest area of untapped potential — with ERP data requiring manual effort to query cited as the biggest blocker. AvidXchange CFO Research, 2023 Fix the connection, and the potential unlocks itself. The analysis that was always theoretically possible becomes practically available — in real time, on demand, without a Wednesday deadline.
This Is What CostBits Was Built For
CostBits connects directly to your Microsoft D365 environment — Finance & Operations, Business Central plus a range of legacy systems like Navision, Axapta etc.— via read-only connectors. No time consuming exports. No manual queries. No spreadsheet intermediaries - just constant live data.The live connection was the foundation. But something unexpected happened during the build. Once the data was flowing in real time, the obvious next question was: why should anyone have to navigate the ERP at all just to find something?
So CostBits now includes full-text search across your entire financial dataset — items, categories, invoices, purchase orders, suppliers — instantly, in one place. Think of it as a search engine built directly on top of your ERP. No searching through odd ERP menus. No modules. No knowing which screen the data lives behind. You type, it finds.
The result: many CostBits users now start every financial search in CostBits — and only open the ERP when they need to take action on what they found. The ERP becomes the place you go to do things. CostBits becomes the place you go to see things.
The time your team currently spends preparing data is the time you get back. The errors buried in manual re-entry are the errors you stop making. The navigation friction that slows down every ERP interaction quietly disappears.
One CostBits licence costs less than one third of one extra hire — and it delivers what no extra hire can: a clean, live connection to every transaction in your ERP, and a search experience that makes your financial data feel, for the first time, genuinely accessible.
The data has always been there. Now you can actually use it.
Don’t let missing data hold your business back. Explore our top 20 free tips for rapid supplier cost reduction or contact CostBits to learn how our platform can unlock the full potential of your invoice data.