Manual data entry rarely shows up as a line item on any budget, which is precisely why it survives for so long. Nobody was hired to retype invoice details from a PDF into an accounting system, or to copy the week's orders from an email folder into a spreadsheet and then into the warehouse tool. The work accumulated quietly, distributed across several people in small daily increments, until it became simply how things are done around here.
The arithmetic is worth doing honestly. Take one person, three hours a day, five days a week. That is roughly seven hundred and fifty hours a year — most of a full-time role, paid for at whatever that person costs you, spent producing no new value whatsoever. Now add the second and third people quietly doing the same thing in other parts of the business. Add the errors that get caught two weeks later, the credit memos, the customer calls, the reconciliation. The direct cost of the typing is usually the smaller half of the total.
There is a second cost that is harder to see and often larger. When information is entered by hand, the business only knows what has been keyed in so far. Decisions get made against a picture that is always a few days stale. Owners learn to compensate with instinct, and that instinct is usually good — but it is being applied to incomplete data when it could be applied to complete data.
Finding this cost is not complicated. For one week, ask each person to note any task where they move information from one place to another without changing it in any meaningful way. Copying, retyping, reformatting, reconciling two lists that should already agree. Total the hours and multiply by the loaded cost of the people doing it. That number is what you are currently paying to avoid building a system, and in most small and medium businesses it is considerably larger than the cost of building one.
The practical response is not to automate everything at once. Take the single largest item on that list, build software that handles it properly, measure what actually came back, and then decide about the second. Automation that proves itself one process at a time is far more likely to survive contact with a real business than a grand transformation program.