A twenty-person company typically runs an HR tool, an attendance or time tool, a board tool, a shared drive, a password manager, a notes app, a screen recorder and something that tracks projects for the leadership team. Eight subscriptions, eight invoices, eight admin consoles. When the finance lead adds them up, the number is annoying but survivable. The number is also wrong, because the invoices are the smallest part of the cost.
The cost you can see: seats
Per-seat pricing means every hire is a price rise across every tool. At eight tools, a new team member is eight seat additions, and a hiring plan of ten people a year is eighty seat-months of new spend before anyone has done any work. This is the line item people negotiate, and it is worth negotiating. It is also the only part of the cost that appears on a spreadsheet, which is why it gets all the attention.
The costs you cannot see
Onboarding, eight times
A new starter receives eight invitations, sets eight passwords, and is added to the right groups in eight places by whoever remembers. If any one is missed, the person spends their first week asking for access. Multiply by the number of hires and by the twenty minutes an admin spends per tool, and onboarding alone is a part-time job nobody budgeted for.
Offboarding, eight times, under pressure
Onboarding is merely slow. Offboarding is a risk. When someone leaves, every tool they had access to needs to be closed, and the one that is forgotten is the one that matters: the shared drive with client files, the password manager with the production credentials. Most organisations discover a forgotten account months later, when a licence audit or a login alert surfaces it. We cover the password side in how to share team passwords safely.
Permissions drift
Each tool has its own idea of a role. "Manager" in the attendance tool means approve leave; "Manager" in the board tool means edit any project; "Manager" in the drive means nothing, because it uses folder sharing. Over a year, people are promoted, move teams and cover for each other, and the eight permission models drift apart. Nobody can answer "what can Priya see?" without opening eight consoles.
Data that never lines up
The same person is a record in every tool, keyed by an email that changes when they marry or by a display name that someone abbreviated. The hours they logged in the time tool cannot be costed because their rate lives in the HR tool, and the projects they logged against do not match the boards, because someone renamed a project in one place. Every cross-tool report is a manual join.
A framework for counting it
Before comparing prices, write down four numbers for the coming year.
- Seat spend: hires planned × tools × average seat price × months remaining. The visible number.
- Access admin hours: (hires + leavers) × tools × 20 minutes. Convert to a salary cost.
- Reconciliation hours: how many recurring reports join data across tools, × the hours each takes, × twelve.
- Incidents: the forgotten-account or shared-password events of the last year, and what each one cost to clean up. If you had none, ask whether you would know.
For most small teams the second and third numbers are larger than the first, and the fourth is the one that keeps the founder awake.
What consolidation actually buys
Consolidating onto one platform is not primarily about a cheaper invoice, although one bill with no per-seat charge helps. It is about the four costs above going to near zero because they were never separate problems. One login means one onboarding and one offboarding. One set of roles, built from granular per-tool permissions, means "what can Priya see?" has one answer. One employee record means the hours in AMS can be costed at the rate in HRMS, the boards in Cadence belong to the same projects, and the credentials in Vault are revoked in the same click that removes the person from everything else.
That is the design behind Orbiz: ten tools that behave as one product, delivered as a web app with a separate database per organisation. It is the trade startups make before the eight invoices arrive, and the one software and IT teams make once the join has become someone’s job.
When consolidation is the wrong call
Be honest about the exceptions. A team whose whole identity lives in one specialist tool — a design studio in its design suite, an accountancy in its practice software — should keep it and consolidate around it. A platform earns its place by removing the eight generic tools, not by replacing the one that makes you good at your job.
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