The Bottleneck: Doing the same setup work, over and over

A lot of finance admin isn’t really “work” in the sense of judgment or decision-making. It’s the same small setup steps repeated every time, because nothing was ever configured to remember them. Standard work, in lean terms, means defining the one right way to do a repeatable task so it doesn’t have to be reinvented, or re-decided, every single time. In your accounting system (such as Xero), that shows up in two places: how data goes in, and how reports come out.

On the way in: defaults

Every invoice from a supplier gets coded manually, even though it’s the same supplier, the same type of cost, the same tax treatment, every month. Every customer invoice gets built from scratch, even though the price, the description, and the VAT rate never actually change. None of this needs a decision each time. It needs a default, set once.

Your accounting system lets you set default accounts, tax rates, and tracking categories per supplier and per customer. Once that’s done, most invoices land already coded correctly, and the only real task left is a quick review, not data entry from a blank page every time.

On the way out: report templates

The same pattern shows up in reverse at reporting time. A management report gets rebuilt from scratch each month, with the same filters re-applied, the same layout re-created, the same columns re-added. That’s standard work too, just on the output side rather than the input side.

Your accounting system lets you save custom report layouts matched to how your business actually needs to see its numbers, so the report runs in a couple of clicks rather than being reconstructed every time.

The outcome

Neither of these fixes is complicated on its own, and that’s the point. Standard work isn’t about a clever new process. It’s about not solving the same small problem repeatedly when it could be solved once. Set once, matched to how your business actually runs, both ends of the process (data in, reports out) get faster every single time after that.

If something here resonates and you want a hand, reach out — sometimes it's a five-minute pointer, sometimes it's a larger piece of work, and I'm happy to figure out which on a quick call.

The Eight Wastes — Applied to a Xero Enviroment

Lean manufacturing identified eight types of waste (muda) — activity that costs time or resources without adding value. I found a lot of inspiration in lean concepts and could see how they map to finance processes, and also map onto process in and around a Xero setup almost exactly. Here's what each looks like in a finance context, and what fixing it usually involves.

1. Transport — unnecessary motion to get information into the accounting system

A paper invoice that has to be scanned. An invoice that has to be downloaded manually. A bank account with no integration. Manual email reminders sent to customer for payment. All of these are motion that doesn't add value — they don't get information into the accounting system efficiently, and they use up time that could go toward more valuable work.

Fix: pooling mailboxes (think accounts_payable@thebottleneck.com), direct integrations with banks and other software, fewer hops between where data starts and where it needs to end up.

2. Inventory — unprocessed items piling up

A backlog of draft invoices. Unreconciled bank lines sitting for weeks. Customer invoices waiting to be sent. This leads to delayed monthly close, and in the worst cases, affects operations and cash flow.

Fix: bank rec rules, automatic reconciliation turned on, auto-publish rules for regular items, recurring journals.

3. Motion — unnecessary manual movement through a task

Searching for the same supplier's bank details every month because they're not saved. Re-entering a customer's VAT treatment every invoice because no default exists. Small, repeated motion nobody notices individually — but it adds up fast at any scale.

Fix: defaults set once, per supplier and customer, so the system remembers what a person currently has to.

4. Waiting — a task stalled on a person, not a process

An invoice sitting in an inbox that doesn't get actioned because the person it landed with is busy driving the business, not processing admin. Reporting delayed because of messy books and poor data quality.

Fix: routing that doesn't depend on one person's availability, and approval chains built for redundancy, not just hierarchy. Reporting time improves once the underlying process and data quality are fixed.

5. Overproduction — doing more than what's needed, before it's needed

Producing detailed management reports nobody reads at that level of granularity yet. Reconciling to the cent when the business only needs directional accuracy at its current stage. Overproduction in finance often looks like diligence, but it's still waste if nobody's using the output.

Fix: match reporting depth to what the business actually acts on, and save custom report formats matched to your business needs in Xero so they can be run quickly without rebuilding every time.

6. Overprocessing — more steps than the task requires

Three approval layers on a €50 subscription. Manually checking every line of a bank feed that a rule could match automatically. Process that was right at one size and never got revisited as the business grew — or never fit in the first place.

Fix: periodically ask whether a control still earns its cost, not just whether it exists.

7. Defects — errors that create rework

Wrong VAT codes on invoices. Bank fees posted incorrectly during reconciliation. A defect isn't just the error itself — it's everything downstream: the correction, the re-review, the loss of trust in the numbers. Defects are usually the most expensive waste, because the cost hits twice — once to do it, once to fix it.

Fix: defaults and validation at the point of entry, so errors are caught before they enter the system rather than after.

8. Non-utilised talent — smart people, no agency to fix things

This might be the biggest waste of all, and it's rarely on the original list. A business hires capable, experienced finance people — then hands them a fixed process and no room to question it. The bookkeeper who can see the same error happening every month but was never asked for their opinion. The finance hire who knows exactly which report nobody reads, but isn't in a position to say so. The talent is in the building. It's just not being used for anything beyond the task in front of them.

Fix: ask the people doing the work what they'd change, and actually give them room to change it. Often the best improvements aren't found by looking harder at the process — they're already sitting in someone's head, unused.

Closing thought: The eight wastes are an excellent way to look at any process and identify where improvements can be made. They map especially well onto finance processes — not just the Xero ecosystem. The really amazing thing is there are loads of automations, tools, and techniques that can help achieve those improvements, and I'm happy to share some of them here.

If something here resonates and you want a hand, reach out — sometimes it's a five-minute pointer, sometimes it's a larger piece of work, and I'm happy to figure out which on a quick call.