Manual orders feel personal. Human. Flexible. That’s the story we’ve told ourselves for years in B2B. But here’s the thing no one wants to say out loud: they’re also killing your margins.
Every phone call. Every email. Every spreadsheet buried in someone’s inbox. All of it adds up to lost time, lost accuracy, and lost focus. Just ask Boska.
1. A manual order is never just one task
At Boska, orders used to come in through every channel imaginable: calls, faxes, handwritten notes, people turning up at the office. And that was just the start.
“On the phone, writing down the order, typing it in the system, pushing the order through to the warehouse, contacting the warehouse… the warehouse sends it back, then you send the tracking number to the customer. All manually.” - Pascal Verheul, Boska
When you map out the true process behind a single "simple" order, the labour cost is staggering. One task becomes five. One team becomes three. One touchpoint becomes ten.
2. You’re scaling admin, not revenue
Manual ordering works, until it doesn’t. It’s fine when you’re dealing with ten accounts. It’s a nightmare when you’re dealing with a thousand.
“Now 90% of the orders go through without us even seeing them… Instead of all the orders one by one.”
Before Boska digitised, the back office was drowning in repeat orders. No time for optimisation. No time for strategy. Just keyboard bashing and order checking. If you’re hiring people to type what your customers could do themselves, you’re spending wrong.
3. Errors live in the gaps between people
Typos. Duplicates. The wrong shipping address. A missed discount. Manual processes create more human touchpoints, and more chances for human error.
When mistakes happen, they’re not just annoying. They’re expensive. Customers get frustrated. Orders need to be re-picked. Time gets wasted chasing couriers or issuing credits.
Digital orders, done right, don’t just remove mistakes. They remove the conditions that make mistakes possible.
4. Your customers want better, even if they don’t say it
One of the big fears: "Our customers like calling us. They’re used to it."
Sure. But what they actually like is ease.
“They were really used to just pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, I want those same products I order every month.’”
Boska’s customers weren’t digital natives. So they reduced the friction: no passwords, just a PIN sent to your email. Clear pricing. Simple account setup. The easier it got, the less resistance they faced.
5. The cost isn’t just financial, it’s strategic
When your sales and support teams are drowning in order processing, they’re not doing the work that grows your business.
No time for account expansion. No headspace for retention strategy. No bandwidth for upsell.
“We changed the whole infrastructure… now orders just flow straight to the 3PL.”
Manual orders drag your best people into the lowest-leverage work. Automating them frees up time to actually build the customer relationships that matter.
Final thoughts: stop treating manual orders like a customer service
They’re not. They’re an operational liability dressed up as helpfulness.
Boska didn’t make the shift overnight. But they committed. They made it easier to order online. They added friction to the old way. And when the time came, they drew a line.
“After a while, we said, ‘No more manual orders.’ People were nervous, ‘we’ll lose sales!’ But we didn’t.”
That’s the real cost of manual orders: they keep you stuck. And the sooner you stop carrying that cost, the faster you can grow.
