You Can’t Cut What You Can’t See: The 150 Basis Point Loss CFOs Miss

CFOs are trained to look for problems in the numbers.

But what if the biggest margin opportunity doesn’t live in a reported line item?

What if it’s scattered across multiple departments, buried inside your people’s voicemail, inboxes, and spreadsheets—repeating quietly, burning hours, and rarely recognized for its drag on productivity?

Because not all margin killers show up clearly.Some get buried in “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

The Fire Drill That Costs 150 Basis Points

Take a common customer question:“When will my order ship?”

Seems simple. But in most distributors and manufacturers, it sets off a cross-functional fire drill. 

Every. Single. Time.

• CSRs field the customer order status request

• Ops pulls inventory reports

• Purchasing finds POs, checks lead times

• Logistics checks freight

• Sales steps in to preserve the relationship

• Data gets stitched together across a mess of department Excel files

At one $60M distributor, this single task burned:• 12,000 hours/year = 6 FTEs• $900K in avoidable labor cost = 150 basis points

And it was happening every day.But no one saw it—because it “wasn’t broken.”Hidden in plain sight.

The Hidden Burden of “Business as Usual”

This kind of margin loss doesn’t show up in your dashboards.It’s spread thin across roles, systems, and emails.No one owns it, but your SG&A absorbs all of it.

It’s what we call basis point burden:

• Repetitive, avoidable work

• Triggered by system silos and broken handoffs

• Considered  “normal” cross-functional operations

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And it’s the work your teams dreadIt’s a drag on margin – and morale.

Want to See It? Walk the Floor.

You don’t need a data warehouse or a consultant to spot the problem.Just do this:

Walk your floor — logistics, supply chain, purchasing, customer service

• Look for open Excel windows

• Ask: “Do you use VLOOKUP?”

• Then ask: “Would you show me how you use it?” 

• Continue to ask “Why” until you see the full picture

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If it’s PO sifting, production checking, ship dates estimating , freight ETAs, or backorder status, you’ve found a basis point bandit—manual work caused by scattered data across systems and glued together with spreadsheets.

And it costs more than you think.

The CFO Bottom Line: Turn That 150 Basis Point Loss Into 200%+ ROI

Here's what happens when you eliminate the fire drill:

• 6 FTEs worth of manual work → 1-click ship date answers

• 12,000 annual hours → 90% time reduction

• $900K labor waste → 200%+ ROI

Your team already knows the business rules. Your systems already have the data. You just need a task-specific decision engine to eliminate the work—forever.

The question isn't whether this work can be eliminated.

The question is: How much margin are you willing to lose while your competitors automate what you're still doing in Excel?

Final Word: Cut the Work, Not the People

CFOs don’t lose margin because of reckless spending.

You lose it because of invisible work that burns time, chokes productivity, and compounds quietly.

You can’t track it on a dashboard.

You can’t slice it in a pivot table.

But you can eliminate it.

Start with the question:“Why don’t we already know when it will ship?”

Then follow the spreadsheet trail.

The margin is already leaving your business. The only question is whether you’re ready to do something about it.

DM me “Prove It” and I’ll send you the Avoidable Cost Calculator that exposes your hidden basis point loss in minutes.