Freecloud Insights
The hidden cost of “we’ll just work around it”
16 February 2026
Most businesses don’t plan to build complicated processes. They evolve them.
A small workaround here. A manual step there. A spreadsheet to bridge two systems. An unofficial process because “it’s quicker this way”.
Each change feels harmless. Helpful, even. Over time, those workarounds become how the business actually runs.
And that’s where the real cost starts.
Workarounds feel cheap. They aren’t.
No one raises a purchase order for a workaround.
- ❌ Hours lost to repetitive manual tasks.
- ❌ Errors that require investigation.
- ❌ Delays waiting for manual fixes.
- ❌ Knowledge trapped in one person’s head.
It doesn’t look expensive. It just makes everything slower and more fragile.
Workarounds quietly become critical processes
The danger isn’t the workaround itself. It’s what happens when the business begins to depend on it.
The spreadsheet becomes the real source of truth. The manual step becomes essential to invoicing. The unofficial process becomes the only way orders get fulfilled correctly.
Then the person who understands it goes on holiday. Or leaves.
Suddenly, the “temporary fix” turns out to be business-critical.
They multiply because they solve real problems
Systems don’t quite fit. Processes weren’t designed for growth. Vendors change things. Businesses adapt faster than platforms do.
So people do what they need to do to keep work moving.
That isn’t failure. It’s survival. But survival fixes accumulate interest.
Workarounds hide the real problem
Because the business keeps running, the underlying issue stays invisible.
People get used to the friction. New staff are trained to follow unofficial steps. What actually happens drifts further from what systems were designed to support.
The tipping point
There’s always a moment when the cost becomes impossible to ignore.
Growth exposes the inefficiency. An audit exposes the risk. An outage exposes the dependency. A key person leaves.
What used to be a clever workaround becomes a bottleneck.
What to look for
- ✅ Rekeying data between systems.
- ✅ Processes that stop when one person is unavailable.
- ✅ Spreadsheets acting as system glue.
- ✅ Steps that rely on memory instead of process.
Fix the friction, not the symptoms
This isn’t about eliminating every workaround overnight. Some are pragmatic. Some are necessary.
The risk comes when nobody knows which is which.
At Freecloud, we start by making friction visible. Not to blame anyone, but to understand where time, risk and effort are quietly leaking away.
Because the most expensive problems in IT rarely arrive with a warning. They grow slowly, disguised as “we’ll just work around it”.