Although many businesses collect huge amounts of data on the goods they buy and services they use, many simply file it away and in doing so, throw away millions of pounds in savings and efficiencies. 

Cost control experts Barcanet have collected together an array of startling statistics that highlight businesses most wasteful practices. Here are some of the most alarming: The average office worker prints over 10,000 pages per year – only 20 percent of them are double-sided. Although 22 percent of suppliers offer discounts, only 47 percent of businesses actually collect them, so more than half throw away savings that the supplier has already agreed to.

Almost 90 percent of businesses can reduce their annual software subscription costs by more than 20 percent if they optimised their licenses. Between 10 and 30 percent of all supplier invoices have errors in them, so businesses are overpaying at least 1 out of every 10 invoices and in some cases almost ⅓ of invoices are incorrectly processed. Although 79 percent of businesses report reducing their electricity costs as essential to their competitive advantage, £90m is approximately how much businesses in the UK spend on electricity by leaving computers on when they are not being used. Add in lighting and this rises by £170m. That's £260m of savings at the flick of a switch. 

With current advances in cloud computing technology and data analytics, the tools to identify these savings are no longer hugely expensive or only available to those with access to supercomputers. It is the organisation of the data itself that is often the main barrier. By creating an organised data collection, storage and analytics capability, businesses can begin to understand their spending at a granular level. This in turn leads to removal of errors, consistent and more favourable terms with their suppliers and lower risks to the business caused by uncontrolled expense.

Barcanet's founder, Ian Yates comments “To put it bluntly, many of the UK's leading companies are simply throwing money away. By utilising data they already collect and then empowering their staff to take control of many of the daily micro-decisions that ultimately determine your bottom line, savings can run into millions of pounds. We're on a mission to show businesses how this can be achieved, improve their productivity and cost control methodology.”