The Cost Behind "We've Always Done It This Way"

On the real risk of never checking if there's a better way.

"We've always done it this way."

I hear some version of that sentence often, usually when I ask a prospect or our existing client why a financial operations process runs the way it does.

Sometimes there's a real reason behind it: a contract, a software that makes changing the process impossible, a regulatory requirement, or some sort of genuine risk that makes caution the right call. Those cases are fine but they are scarce. What I want to talk about is what happens most of the time.

Why people actually say it

There are really two reasons behind that answer.

The first is quite simple. The person has never seen a better way of doing things. This is all they know, and it doesn't occur to them to question it.

The second is more honest, and harder to admit. Someone on the team already knows a better way probably exists, but avoids it anyway. Because changing the process can expose the fact it was easier to leave things alone. Implementing a new process has a way of surfacing gaps underneath it, in the systems it touches, in how the old process actually worked day to day, sometimes in a team's own skills. On top of that, a genuinely steep learning curve is a real cost, even before anything goes wrong.

Whichever reason is true, the outcome is identical. The process stays exactly as it was and nobody is asking whether it really has to.

Where this shows up

The most common place I see this reluctance to change showing up is managing banking relationships.

Take a business with multiple bank accounts, using them for payments to suppliers, staff and business expenses, one of the most common scenarios I encounter. When money needs to move between entities and transferred from one business account to another, the company might be paying transfer fees. On their own money, money that was never meant to technically leave the business.

The bigger cost is visibility. When someone asks "how much cash the business actually has right now, and how much has already gone out", giving an answer means logging into each bank separately, downloading statements, and manually stitching them into a report. By the time that report is done, it's already out of date. More transactions have happened while it was being built.

Manual bank reconciliation repeats the same story. Someone is still matching statements to invoices line by line, still chasing a payment because the reference didn't quite match what was expected, because that's how the books have always been closed.

Another one that fits the same bucket is employee expenses. People still pay out of pocket and file a claim afterward, which means the same money effectively moves twice. Once out of someone's personal account, and again back into it once the claim clears. It's worked this way for years, so it keeps working this way.

The thing is, none of these were the wrong choice when they started. It made sense once but perhaps not anymore. What's missing is someone going back to check whether the reason they started still holds.

What it actually costs

The hours are the easy part to see: chasing a mismatched reference, logging into a third portal, processing reimbursements one at a time instead of letting them clear automatically.

The harder cost is what happens to decisions. It's difficult to decide anything confidently, how much cash to hold, which spend or investment to approve, when the honest answer to how much the business actually has right now is "give me a day to find out." This is a decision that costs more than productivity, and it's the more expensive of the two in the long run.

One client I know saved 288 hours a year once they bit the bullet and automated some mundane day-to-day processes. Then they went a step further and automated banking. This saved them 90 days a year on opening an account for transacting in foreign currencies, alongside a 30% cut in banking fees. Ninety days, in a single year, spent on account-opening friction most businesses treat as an unavoidable cost of doing business internationally.

The risk of staying the same

None of this holds steady while everything else stays the same, either. It compounds. Add another entity, another currency, a few more million in transaction volume, and the same manual process gets disproportionately harder to run, takes longer and, ironically, needs more people that need to be trained. The friction costing a few hours a week today costs a great deal more once the business running underneath it has doubled.

Which flips the fear from earlier around: the real risk behind "we've always done it this way" is leaving the process untouched while the business keeps growing on top of it.

Not deciding is still a decision. It's made by default, over and over, by whoever never asked the question.