The three operational taxes that go unchecked in your business

In the world of business, we face countless taxes, ranging from National Insurance contributions, business rates, and if you turn a profit corporation tax. But there are a whole host of taxes in your day-to-day business that no creative accountancy can help you navigate. In this article we’re going to discuss three taxes, the toggling tax, the focus tax, and the ignorance tax, you pay them every day and Shoothill can help you avoid them.

Toggling tax

Signing in to different software, finding the next page you need to use and waiting for the next system to update with the data you need to get your job done. For many businesses and employees, it may seem like this is just what working is like.

It’s reported by productivity software provider Asana that employees only actually spend 27% of their time working with their skills, leaving the rest to meetings, gossiping, admin, and jumping between applications. There are measures to take to help reduce the time spent on each of these. Cut meeting times by hosting stand-ups, reducing gossiping time by ruling with an iron fist, admin by commissioning custom software and jumping between applications by building a complete enterprise management platform.

In 2022 Harvard Business Review coined the term the toggling tax. The idea is that when moving between say an email and a spreadsheet it takes a few seconds to orientate yourself. The HBR performed some research across 137 staff for 5 weeks. They found that 1 switch takes 2 seconds and an employee switch around 1,200 times a day.

That adds up to 40 minutes a day, just jumping between software platforms, or nearly a full working week every year. When put in those terms, the true cost of inappropriate systems rears its head – and that’s just from the mindless act of moving between software systems.

To battle the toggle tax, you can consider a complete end-to-end business management system – built bespoke for your organisation to eradicate these time sinks at every level of your business. These solutions can include everything from stock procurement to accounting.

Focus tax

The benefits of custom software go beyond this 9% efficiency gain found by eliminating the toggling tax. By allowing your staff to stay within one platform you’re not asking them to constantly refocus on different systems, instead, they can follow a workflow that is reinforced by an intelligently designed software system. As a result, their attention span isn’t as depleted, your team have a discounted focus tax, meaning they’re more productive and focused.

You’ve got enough battling for your employees' attention these days, the average person checks their phone, depending on the study between 58 and 144 times a day. That’s quite a difference – but still a lot either way. Reducing the number of times someone needs to focus aids in their ability to focus.

It’s suggested now that the average attention span is around only 7 seconds, if you can work to improve this among your team – well you can get more done and get the edge in the market.

Ignorance tax

There are two sides to the ignorance tax. The first is the cost of education – i.e compiling reports from disjointed systems constructed of archaic software systems, poorly managed spreadsheets and often at the expense of high billing work.

The second cost is the lack of this data, when you don’t run your business through a unified platform, there are realms of your business that go unmonitored. With all your business data flowing through a singular platform you’ve got enhanced data insight into your business – this means you’ve got enhanced oversight, instantaneous reporting from live data. This means the correct operational decisions can be made, from reports produced on demand not compiled ahead of team meetings at great expense.

If you'd like to get around these taxes in your business consider speaking with the team at Shoothill, who through the creative application of technology will get your business growing again.

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