The problem nobody measures

Most webshop owners know their document situation is not ideal. Orders arrive through Refurbed and BackMarket, but as the seller you are responsible for generating and storing the invoice for each customer. Returns generate paperwork that ends up in email threads. Supplier documents live in someone's downloads folder. When an accountant, a marketplace dispute, or an audit letter arrives, the answer is usually: let me find that.

The time that takes is rarely counted as a cost. It should be.

Where the costs come from

1. Time lost searching for documents
A McKinsey study found that employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day searching for and gathering information. IDC research puts the productivity loss from document-related challenges specifically at 21.3% of the working day.
For a two-person webshop, that translates to roughly €75 to €100 lost per person per day, based on a conservative €25 per hour. Over 220 working days, that is between €16,500 and €22,000 per year in time spent on the document problem alone.
This is what happens when you add up the ten minutes looking for a supplier invoice, the twenty minutes reconstructing a return record for a dispute, and the half-hour pulling files together for your accountant at quarter-end.

2. The cost of processing invoices manually
Multiple accounts payable (AP, the part of your administration that handles incoming invoices) benchmarking studies put the cost of processing one invoice manually at between €14 and €24. That figure includes staff time for data entry, error correction, and filing.

For a retailer processing 150 invoices per month across suppliers and returns, that is between €25,000 and €43,000 per year. Well-organised or automated processing brings that cost down to roughly €3 to €4 per invoice. The error rate matters too: about 39% of manually processed invoices contain errors, and each one requires time to find and fix.

3. Compliance exposure
Dutch refurbished device retailers are subject to Thuiskopieheffing, the levy administered by Stichting de Thuiskopie on devices capable of making copies of copyright-protected material. Assessments are based on invoice records. We have seen assessments range from €4,000 to over €40,000 on a single audit cycle. The difference between a clean result and a disputed one often comes down to whether you can produce the right documentation quickly.

Dutch tax law also requires businesses to retain invoices and records for seven years. An inability to produce those records during a Belastingdienst (Dutch tax authority) audit can result in estimated corrections that are rarely in your favour.

A practical calculation

For a representative Dutch webshop: two to four people, selling on Refurbed and BackMarket, processing around 150 invoices per month.

Compliance penalties sit outside this table because they are not a fixed annual cost. But a single Thuiskopie assessment at the lower end of the range adds €4,000 to the picture immediately.

For a webshop turning over €500,000 per year, the operational cost alone represents 7 to 10% of revenue.

The fix is not a better folder structure

A stricter policy about where files should be saved does not solve the problem. Documents arrive in different formats from different sources and need to be connected to each other to be useful.

What actually helps is being able to search for what a document is about, not just where it was saved. That means finding "all supplier invoices from Q3 2024" or "all return records for BackMarket orders over €200" and getting a complete result, quickly.

That is what turns a document archive from a liability into something you can actually use.

A note from Verbrio: The most common issue we see with refurbished device retailers is that their documents exist but cannot be found under time pressure. Verbrio helps Dutch SMEs search and retrieve business documents using AI-powered tools hosted in Europe, so you can find what you need when an assessor or auditor asks for it. Find out more at verbrio.com