The real cost of running five systems: a services firm TCO breakdown
Licence fees are the small part of what a fragmented tool stack actually costs. Counting the reconciliation work, the duplicate data entry and the report nobody trusts changes the total more than most budget reviews account for, worked through here at 80 people.
A services firm running separate tools for projects, HR, leave and productivity reporting pays for each one twice: once in licence fees, and again in the human hours spent reconciling data that disagrees across systems. At 80 people, the reconciliation cost alone is typically larger than the combined licence spend — and it is almost never in a budget line, which is why it survives unnoticed for years.
Ask a finance lead what the firm spends on software and you will get a number built from invoices: the project tool's subscription, the HR platform's per-employee fee, whatever the leave tracker costs, and maybe a line for the spreadsheet macros nobody officially budgeted for. That number is real, and it is also the smaller part of the true cost.
The five systems most services firms end up with
What the licence fees actually add up to
| System | Typical monthly cost per user |
|---|---|
| Project and sprint tool | $5 – $16 |
| HR / leave platform | $1.25 – $4.50 |
| Timesheet / approval add-on | $3 – $7 |
| Productivity reporting | Spreadsheet — analyst time, not a licence fee |
Summed, the licensed portion of this stack runs roughly $9 to $27 per user per month, before the spreadsheet's hidden cost is counted at all. That figure is what shows up in a vendor-comparison spreadsheet, and it is genuinely useful for comparing subscriptions to each other. It is not useful for understanding what the fragmentation is actually costing the business.
The cost nobody puts in a budget line
The larger and invisible cost is reconciliation: the recurring human effort of exporting data from each system and manually assembling a picture that spans all of them, because none of the systems share a definition of an employee, a project or an hour. Every question that crosses a system boundary — how many billable hours did the leave-affected sprint actually produce, which employee's productivity number is correct given the HR system shows a different headcount than the timesheet — becomes manual work, every time it is asked.
Take an 80-person firm with a delivery lead, an HR coordinator and a PM each spending time on this monthly: roughly 6 hours for the delivery lead assembling the productivity report, 4 hours for HR reconciling leave against the timesheet system, and 2 hours per PM (say 6 PMs) cross-checking sprint hours against approvals — 12 hours. That is 22 hours a month, before counting the smaller ad-hoc reconciliations that happen whenever a client or an exec asks an unscheduled question.
| Role | Hours / month | Loaded hourly cost | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery lead — productivity report | 6 | $45 | $270 |
| HR coordinator — leave reconciliation | 4 | $30 | $120 |
| 6 PMs — sprint/hours cross-check | 12 | $40 | $480 |
| Total reconciliation cost / month | 22 | — | $870 |
At 80 users, the licence stack above runs roughly $720 to $2,160 a month. The reconciliation cost of $870 a month sits squarely inside that range, and it is a cost with no line item, no vendor to negotiate with, and no natural moment where anyone questions it — because it is absorbed as 'part of the job' rather than counted as a cost of the tool stack that made it necessary.
A reconciliation cost with no invoice attached to it is not a cost that doesn't exist. It is a cost that never gets reviewed, which is worse.
The report nobody trusts
The final, hardest-to-quantify cost is credibility. A productivity or utilisation figure assembled from four exports, by hand, once a month, arrives with enough silent judgement calls — which timesheet row counts, which leave request was backdated, which PM's spreadsheet formula is slightly different from another's — that nobody fully trusts it, including the person who built it. Review meetings spend time debating the number instead of acting on it, which is its own recurring cost and the hardest one to put a dollar figure against.
What one data model actually saves
Tell us what you currently pay for and how many people reconcile data between systems each month. We will show you the like-for-like comparison, in writing, on the call.