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From 100+ hours to 2: what custom import tooling really does
A client’s team was entering thousands of event records by hand — well over a hundred hours per cycle, with errors creeping in at every step. The fix wasn’t a bigger team. It was a small, boring, purpose-built import system.
Why generic importers weren’t enough
Off-the-shelf CSV importers assume clean data and simple fields. Real business data has neither: inconsistent columns, duplicate rows, relationships between records, and rules only the team knows. A generic tool imports the mess faithfully.
What the custom plugin did differently
- Validated every row against the business rules before anything was saved
- Batched processing so large files never hit a timeout
- De-duplicated against existing records instead of creating copies
- Showed progress and a review screen so a human approved the result
The measured outcome: the same cycle now takes about two hours, most of which is review. The lesson generalises — when a workflow burns real hours every month, purpose-built admin tooling usually pays for itself on the first run.
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