Nobody has ever measured what the payment run costs us

The payment run is the business's most repeated process: applications assembled, certificates checked, subcontractors assessed, notices served, every month, on deadlines. And because the cost of it is salary time rather than an invoice, it has never been counted - it takes what it takes, and the errors it produces surface later, disguised as other problems.

An unmeasured process cannot be improved, defended or even discussed properly: every conversation about fixing it runs into nobody knows what it costs now. Measured once - hours per cycle, where they go, which steps produce the errors that get caught downstream - the run turns into a number, and the number is rarely small. That is what makes the case for changing anything, and just as often, the case for leaving parts of it alone.