Businesses Win When Their Tools Fit Them, Not the Other Way Around

The Work We Pretend Isn’t a Problem

Most businesses aren’t losing money in dramatic ways. They’re losing it one tiny, invisible task at a time. Every business has work that nobody questions. It’s been there for years. It blends into the background. You don’t notice the cost because it’s scattered across little moments throughout the week. All this time adds up to real money lost.

We recently looked at a use case that revealed exactly this kind of inefficiency. A business came to us with a problem. They had an employee spending an exorbitant number of hours every week entering details from receipts into a spreadsheet so their company could be reimbursed by their clients. The reimbursements across hundreds of employees added up to big money that needed to be carefully tracked.

From the 40,000-foot view, this seemed like quick, meaningless data-entry work. Nothing dramatic. Just a steady drip of time and attention being pulled into a task that felt small but slowly grew to consume a large part of their week.

That’s the trap. These tasks feel too minor to challenge. But multiply them over months and years and you realize the business has been quietly giving away huge sums of time and money for no reason. The worst part is that people get used to it. They accept the inefficiency because no one ever questions the premise. “We do it this way because it’s the way it’s always been done.”

A Small Tool Changed Everything

To challenge this problem, in a very short amount of time we built a small proof-of-concept tool to solve this challenge. Nothing massive. Just a script that could use AI to read receipts, extract the important details, and produce a clean CSV.

We showed that investing a few weeks into developing this proof-of-concept, we could turn it into a simple web app that frees up a meaningful portion of that employee’s time. People still verify the data, but thanks to AI they no longer need to type it in by hand. The tool handles the grunt work, scanning, analyzing, compiling, and exporting to CSV. The human handles the judgment, cross-checks and verifies all receipts and totals match up. In this model there is a place for both the AI and the human. Everyone wins.

The economics are surprisingly straightforward. When you automate a repetitive task that happens every week, the time savings compound so fast that the tool ends up paying for itself in the first year. After that, every hour saved is value the business keeps instead of value it loses.

If your employee is spending 40-50% of their time on simple cognitive tasks, such as data entry, that’s money lost. Spending $25-35k on a simple web app to solve this challenge can pay for itself within a year. ($50k unloaded salary X 50% = $25k). Once you load the additional overhead costs of your employee, you can see how quickly targeted AI improvements can pay off.

Big Platforms Aren’t Solving Our Problems

These tiny tasks are like slow leaks in your house. You rarely notice them until months or years later when you are trying to figure out why your utility bill doubled. In the end, you pay for both the unnecessary costs and the unseen damage behind the walls. This doesn’t show up on the balance sheet. It shows up through attrition, burnout, and employees who get tired of work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

For decades, we were told to buy large corporate platforms to fix their challenges, think QuickBooks, Salesforce, Deltek, SAP, etc. But those platforms were built to solve everyone’s challenges at once, which often means subpar solutions to your challenges. They force your workflow into someone else’s mold. They take your data and your process and reshape them to fit the software instead of the other way around. And these platforms are expensive when you only need a handful of features out of a massive system.

Now we can flip the model. Instead of bending your business around the software and shoehorning your data into it, you build the software around your business. AI lowers the cost of building small, precise tools that match the way your team already operates, taking advantage of the natural flow of your team. And because these tools are internally built and maintained, you own them. You can expand them, modify them, move them, retire them. They’re yours.

The Case for Building Your Free Future

That’s the idea behind what I call Freedom-as-a-Service. It’s not a product. It’s an idea, simply the belief that businesses should wholly control their own technology and data. If you want to host it yourself, you can. If you want someone else to manage it, that’s fine too. But you shouldn’t be locked into something you can’t move away from.

You should always be able to take your tools with you. When I first started working with computers that is how it was. Software was monolithic, more like physical building blocks you could take with you and use over and over till you decided to change up a component. Our systems and data were never meant to be hostage to another person or company. They were meant to be portable, extensible, and closely controlled.

Businesses don’t need permission to fix their own problems. They need the freedom and the courage to build the right tool for themselves. The funny part is that none of this requires a massive digital transformation project. It starts by noticing the normal parts of your business that feel heavy. The tasks people avoid. The things everyone assumes “just have to be done manually.” Those are usually the first places where a small, focused internal tool can make a massive difference. Start small, experiment, and you just might find some low-hanging fruit.

The future of business technology isn’t enormous one-size-fits-all systems. It’s the right-fit systems. Tools built specifically for the work you actually do, owned by the people who rely on them every day. When a company starts reclaiming those parts of its operation, even one small workflow at a time, everything gets faster and more resilient. And people finally get to spend their time doing work that matters instead of work they’ve merely tolerated.

Most companies don’t need more software. They need control over the software they depend on. And we’re finally at a point where that’s not only possible, it’s practical. The future won’t belong to the biggest platforms. It belongs to the companies willing to take control and build exactly what their work demands.