On 23 October the government announced plans to cut "form-filling and pointless paperwork" for businesses. It says the changes will save almost £800 million a year, with more of the detail due in the Budget on 28 October.
Some of it is aimed squarely at small firms. Fewer survey requests from the ONS. Clearer compliance guidance. And a planned rule to make small companies file their profit and loss with Companies House from 2028 has been paused, in line with what ICAEW describes as the "tell government once" principle.
The Chancellor, John Healey, put it simply: "British firms are fed up with form-filling and pointless paperwork that eats into valuable time and money."
He's right. But in most small businesses I've worked with, the paperwork that eats the most time isn't the government's. It's the business asking itself for the same information again and again.
Where the duplicate admin really is
Look at a normal week in a business that sells products.
An order comes in on Shopify. Someone checks it against stock in another system. Someone else raises the invoice in Xero. If the customer rings up, sales looks them up in the CRM, which has its own copy of their address and their order history.
That's one order living in four places. Each copy needs someone to type it, check it or fix it.
Then there's the stuff nobody counts. The stock take on a clipboard that gets keyed into a spreadsheet. The weekly report where someone corrects the numbers before the boss sees them. The courier labels printed from one system with addresses copied from another.
None of that shows up as "admin" on a timesheet. It just shows up as being busy.
Tell the business once
The government's principle works just as well inside a company. Each piece of information should be entered once, in one place, and every other system should read it from there.
In practice that means deciding which system owns which number:
Stock. One system holds the true stock figure. The shop, the marketplaces and the warehouse all read from it. I've written about this for Shopify and warehouse stock.
Money. Invoices and payments live in your accounts system. Orders flow into it, rather than being typed in again. That's the job of a Xero integration.
Customers. One record per customer, with their orders attached. Not a CRM with one version and an order system with another. That's what CRM and order management integration is for.
Once ownership is clear, the copying stops being a job. The systems pass the information along between themselves.
How to find it in an afternoon
You don't need a consultant to find your own duplicate admin. Sit with the people who do the work and ask three questions:
- Where do you type something that already exists in another system?
- Which number do you fix by hand before anyone trusts it?
- If you were off for a week, what would stop?
The answers are your list. Start with the one that happens most often, not the one that annoys the boss most.
This is also the right moment to do it. If the Budget changes your costs on Wednesday, you'll want numbers you can trust to work out what it means. Numbers that someone has to fix first are slower and less reliable.
The bit the government can't fix for you
Cutting outside paperwork is welcome. But it's a small slice of the week for most firms. The bigger saving sits in your own systems, and only you can decide to take it.
If you want help working out where your systems are asking for the same thing twice, get in touch.
Sources
- GOV.UK, Government slashes red tape and tariffs to give businesses breathing space, 23 Oct 2026: gov.uk/government/news/government-slashes-red-tape-and-tariffs-to-give-businesses-breathing-space
- ICAEW, Chancellor pledges to save UK SMEs £800m a year in admin costs, 23 Oct 2026: icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2026/oct-2026/chancellor-pledges-to-save-uk-smes-800m-a-year-in-admin-costs
- BBC News, 23 Oct 2026: bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm5ynpywq1e3o