ctrl c. ctrl v?
pls tell me this is what you spend most of your time doing
I’ve been thinking about a demo call from last week.
Not because of the technology discussion, but because of what happened about 20 minutes in.
Before I tell you that story, here are three data points that suddenly made a lot more sense:
76% of workers spend 1-3 hours daily just moving data from one place to another.
Manual data entry costs U.S. companies $28,500 per employee annually.
56% of employees experience burnout due to repetitive tasks.
Coming back to the demo call. And context about these stats…
Emily is a debt specialist at a financial services company.
On a demo call, she walked me through her workflow:
1. Open the settlement letter PDF.
2. Switch to the spreadsheet.
3. Paste into Column A.
4. Back to PDF.
5. Switch.
6. Paste.
About 10 minutes into watching this, she stopped mid-sentence.
Her voice had changed (she was exhausted).
She processes about 200 settlement letters a week.
Each one takes 5-7 minutes of manual data entry.
That’s 17 hours a week, almost half her job, just copying and pasting.
“I’m actually good at this,” she said. “I’ve gotten fast.
But I have a finance degree. I didn’t think this was what I’d be doing.”
We built Docsumo to solve exactly this problem.
After Emily’s call, I started seeing the pattern everywhere.
The loan processor with carpal tunnel from scrolling through bank statements.
The property manager who had nightmares about utility bills.
The AP specialist who knew every invoice template by heart.
They’d all built coping mechanisms.
Colour-coded tabs.
Highlighting systems.
“Focus music” playlists.
One person timed how many documents they could process before their coffee got cold (that’s insane!!).
Leadership often views “document processing” as a line item.
They rarely see the exhaustion and the people who’d stopped mentioning their job at parties.
What most people do not tell you about manual document processing:
It wastes both people and time.
Emily is smart. Finance degree. She understood debt restructuring, cash flow analysis, and negotiation strategy.
She should have been analysing portfolios and making strategic decisions.
Instead: Cell A1, Cell B1, Cell C1. Repeat 200 times. Go home. Do it tomorrow.
When we automated her workflow, 5-minute documents became 40-second extractions.
First week: The team kept checking the data. How could it be this fast?
Second week: She called me. Laughing this time.
“I processed last month’s backlog in 90 minutes. So I actually read through the settlement terms. Found three accounts where we could negotiate better. Called the clients. They were shocked I had time.”
That’s the thing. When you give people their time back, they don’t just work faster. They start working like humans again.
What matters is what happens after.
The loan officer is approving applications in 10 minutes instead of 60.
The property manager spends time on tenants instead of utility bill entry.
The debt specialist was using her brain for the job she was hired to do.
How many people in your organisation are one bad day away from crying over a spreadsheet?
You probably don’t know. They’ve gotten good at hiding it.
If someone on your team is drowning in document chaos, copying, pasting, validating, and reformatting, that’s not a productivity issue. It’s a human one.
— Rushabh
P.S. We turn document chaos into clean data automatically. For efficiency metrics and the people doing the work. If your team is buried in manual data entry, let’s talk.
P.P.S. Emily got promoted, by the way. Turns out, when you have time to think strategically, people notice.