The Difference Between Comfort and Efficiency

Causes and consequences

Comfort is a higher quality of life today, and efficiency is what can provide the possibility of a comfortable life tomorrow. But you shouldn’t confuse causes and consequences, because otherwise it can lead to undesirable results. Comfort is not always efficient and efficiency is not always comfortable, but the main thing is not to confuse one with the other.

Precondition

Perhaps one of the main reasons why small companies don’t keep accounting records, after not understanding the very fact of its necessity, is that it will be inconvenient/uncomfortable for them. When a business owner brings a warehouse worker to a session who says it will be difficult or inconvenient for them to register something in the system, that they don’t have some “green button” that would do some function for them, while this warehouse worker spends 60% of their time on YouTube — and this is the reason why accounting is “not the right time” — it says that comfort is more important than efficiency (primarily for the owner, because they are comfortable in the state they are currently in).

Unconscious goal

When a company spends money on visualizing data in a report whose only result is its mere existence, and defines the effectiveness of such work only by the comfort of the expenses incurred, these are also signals that indicate the problem of substituting comfort for efficiency.

Conclusions

Efficiency should always be measured in money that accounting saves through quality management decisions — by increasing speed, transparency, accuracy, reliability, and flexibility. This is almost always difficult to evaluate, because most impacts are indirect, such as subjective decisions by managers or reduction of risks associated with ease of administration. But you should think, first and foremost, in this context, and not in the paradigm of convenience, which often has no relation to efficiency from the perspective of the enterprise’s beneficiaries.