What does it cost you to enter your business details over and over again?
The costs of repeatedly entering business details don't appear in an invoice you receive, but in the time it takes: someone has to look up, enter and verify your Chamber of Commerce number, VAT number, business description and product details each time a new account, platform or regulation comes along. That time is real, even though there's no price tag attached to it.
What exactly determines those costs is not the same for every business. It depends on how many platforms you work with, how often your business details change, and how many people at your organisation have access to those forms. Below we explain where it comes from and which factors push costs up.
Where it comes from
An undertaking that falls under multiple European regulations typically also deals with multiple windows or platforms: one for product safety, one for packaging, one for accessibility, one for personal data. Each of those platforms operates independently and asks for the same basic business details when you sign up: legal form, Chamber of Commerce number, VAT number, registered address, contact person. This is then often followed by a product dossier: what you sell, in which countries, and under which name.
That entry is not a lot of work in itself. It only becomes a cost item when it repeats: with each new platform, with each change to your business details, and with each check to verify that the details are still correct everywhere. If you move, change your VAT number, or add a new product, that ideally needs to be updated in all the places where it appears. If that doesn't happen everywhere, differences between platforms emerge that later need to be corrected.
What determines the costs
The most important factor is the number of platforms you work with. A webshop selling own-brand products to multiple countries often falls under more regulations than a service provider that only operates domestically, and therefore has more sign-ups and more repeated data entry.
A second factor is how often your details change. A business that regularly adds new products or moves offices needs to make those updates more frequently than a business whose details remain the same for years.
A third factor is the number of people at your organisation who have access to those forms. When multiple employees manage accounts independently, without anyone overseeing who entered what where, the risk of discrepancies increases. This is not so much a cost item in itself, but something that increases the likelihood of errors and thus additional correction work.
Where it adds up
The costs of repeated data entry usually only become visible when something goes wrong: an audit that reveals the address on one platform doesn't match the address on another, or a product dossier that has been updated in one place but not in another. Correcting such discrepancies often costs more time than getting it right the first time would have. answers to practical questions about multiple accounts goes further into situations like these.
Sign-up itself also takes time that comes back with each platform: searching for documents, filling in the same fields, waiting for confirmation. With one platform, that's a matter of half an hour. With four platforms, it's four times half an hour, plus the time to remember where you entered what.
What it saves to do it once
Reglia is set up to address precisely this point, and nothing more than that: a business and product dossier that you fill in once and that connected platforms read from, so you don't have to type it in separately at each platform. what reglia does and does not do with your data describes exactly how it works and where the limit lies of what reglia itself handles.
That does not change what the platforms themselves ask of you in terms of compliance; those obligations remain with the platform and with the supervisor responsible for it. What it does change is how often you have to enter the same information. A business account with reglia is free in this regard and remains so, and is linked to your company, not to a single login or email address. What you subsequently use and pay for at a platform is up to that platform itself; an overview of how that is structured shows where which costs come from and where they don't.
Curious how that looks in practice for your situation? See which platforms are connected and what they do exactly on the overview of connected platforms.