What it costs when the person who knew everything leaves

Three weeks before her holiday, the office manager warns that she will be hard to reach. Nobody else knows which file holds the quotes waiting for a follow-up, or which supplier is still waiting for an answer. The company runs smoothly, as long as she is there.

What only one person carries in their head#

It is almost never a secret kept on purpose. It is a personal spreadsheet, emails filed in one inbox, a notebook, or simply a habit: she knows that one client always wants a reminder call before signing, that one supplier prefers a phone call to an email, that last month's quote is still waiting for an answer.

When I go on holiday, I'm the one who handles all the paperwork.

None of it is written anywhere a colleague can go and read. As long as she is at her desk, it does not show. The day she is not, every open file turns into a puzzle for whoever stays behind.

Spotting the risk with three questions#

To find out whether a task in the company depends on a single person, three questions are enough:

• If she is away for a week, who actually knows where to look?
• Can a colleague pick up the file without messaging her to understand where it stands?
• Is what she does every day written down anywhere, or only in her head?

A single negative answer flags a fragile task. In a project-based business, it is almost always the same ones: tracking pending quotes, chasing suppliers, filing site or delivery documents.

Calculating the cost of an absence: an example#

Take a distribution company with 18 people. One person alone tracks pending quotes and unconfirmed supplier orders. She goes on holiday for three weeks, with nobody taking the time to hand that tracking over before she leaves.

This only counts the time spent searching, or waiting for her return to decide. It does not count the decisions put on hold, nor the quote that goes unchased and never signs because the right information was not in front of the right person at the right moment.

When it is not holidays, but a resignation#

The same calculation applies to a resignation, over a much longer stretch. Three weeks of searching between two colleagues become several months, the time it takes whoever takes over the role to find alone what was never written down: why one client gets a particular discount, why one supplier invoices in two instalments, where a given file actually stood the day she left.

Some information is never found again. It disappears along with the person, and the company often only notices months later, when a client calls back about a verbal agreement nobody remembers anymore.

What changes with an application built for the company#

In an application built for the company, pending quotes, ongoing follow-ups and supplier files live in one place, visible to whoever needs to check them, not just to whoever created them. A colleague who opens the application while another is away sees the same list, with the same dates and the same history: who followed up, when, and what is still left to do.

Nothing to hand over at the last minute before someone leaves, because there was never a personal file to pass on in the first place. The information has always lived in the same place, whether or not the person who entered it is around.

What does not work#

Asking someone to "write everything down" the day before their holiday fixes nothing. She writes what comes to mind that day, not what a colleague will actually need to know three weeks later about a specific file. And a memo running several pages long, nobody really reads it again when it matters.

An employee's departure: the key takeaways#

The risk is not that someone leaves: it is that the company only discovers, at that moment, that entire parts of the work lived solely in her memory or her inbox. Spotting this beforehand, with the three questions above, costs an hour of discussion per role concerned.

An application built for the company does not remove the need to hand over know-how, but it stops the information itself from disappearing along with the person. Working out what that is worth follows the same method as the cost of a custom business application: what the current setup costs, set against what the application would cost.