What does our data work cost beyond the invoice?
Put a first euro figure on the hours, unused tools and errors that no data budget shows.
Open the FTE Debt calculator For CFOsFor CEOs and CFOs of e-commerce and mobile app companies
What is your data really costing the business?
Most companies know what data costs them: the cloud bill, the licences, the data team. Almost none know what it costs everyone else. The finance report rebuilt by hand every Friday. The number double-checked before anyone trusts it. The decision that waits two days. In one e-commerce company those hours added up to €930,000 a year.
I find that number, and hand back the list of what to stop paying for.
2 min · who this is forLior Barak
€930,000
a year in business capacity consumed by data workarounds, in one e-commerce company
€611,000
of it leaving the business entirely: hours, unused tooling, and preventable errors
3 weeks
to measure it, with the first cancellations executed before the engagement ends
From client engagements. Anonymized. Measured against the client's own payroll rates and cloud bills.
Built data functions from the inside at
Zalandoidealo
Author of What Data Really CostsThree roles, three first stepsCFO Data team lead CEO
Your first step depends on your seat.
CFO, data team lead or CEO: each gets one tool that gives a first answer in minutes.
Where does my team's week really go?
See how much of the week is unplanned work, and take the evidence to leadership.
Check where your week went For data teamsDoes my leadership team agree on what data is for?
Test whether your leaders share one answer, and whether the work is becoming an asset or just a cost.
Open the Data Decision Tree For CEOsWhat CEOs and CFOs ask before they say yes.
What should we stop paying for in our data spend?
Stop paying for work nobody uses, rebuilds or double-checks. Look in three places: manual reporting hours that a trusted number would remove, licences and pipelines nobody opens, and products with no business decision attached. Each one can be checked against payroll rates and supplier invoices, and your team can repeat the review after I leave.
See how the method works →How do I explain the value of the data team to the board and investors?
Report cost and return, not activity. Put the full cost of data work on one page, including the business hours around it, then link each major product to a decision it changed or a cost it removed. A first number measured against payroll rates and supplier invoices is enough to start. A directional truth is more useful than a precise silence.
Get a first number →How do I increase trust in our data?
Trust grows when people stop having to verify. It drops when the same number comes out differently depending on who produced it, and the rechecking hours are a cost you can count. Fix the few numbers leadership uses most, name who owns each one, and show how it is calculated.
What distrust costs →How do I create data ownership in the company?
Name a business owner for every data product. A named executive should answer for what each product costs and what it returns, not only the team that built it. Make each request show what it displaces, and review each product on a fixed rhythm. Without that, the data team owns everything and the business owns nothing.
How the review rhythm works →
"Data learned to speak in technical terms. That was fine while it was a technical problem. Now it is a business investment, and the missing piece is a shared language that the CEO, the CFO and the data team can all use."
Fifteen years inside data organizations, including Zalando and idealo. Impact Operations is the method I built to give them that language. I sit in your boardroom until your team runs it without me.
Not sure where to start? Bring the one data cost you can't explain. Thirty minutes, no slides, no pitch.
Book a 30-minute call →