The costs of poor documentation appear as a line item in no budget plan. As a result, avoiding these costs shows up in no report either. Both are real and measurable in concrete amounts, and both are spread across many cost centres. This double invisibility is the real lever that goes untouched in most organisations.
When companies talk about documentation costs, they almost always mean the direct items: staff, software licences, translation orders. On the other side of the ledger sit the invisible follow-on costs and the amount that good documentation would save against those follow-on costs. I want to make both visible in this article.
Why the ledger is hard to read
The connection between documentation quality and concrete costs is rarely directly apparent. When a service technician needs two hours longer for a commissioning because the operating manual describes the setting parameters incorrectly, this appears in the accounts as service effort with no reference to the documentation problem.
A typical constellation is one in which technical writers stand at the end of a supply chain and have to piece together information that should long since have been documented. The effort is real, the cause structural. The accounting does not draw the connection, because the costs surface in different places.
That makes the topic hard to grasp. In the accounts there is no line anyone could point to. At the next budget discussion the problem therefore fails to appear again. The potential saving from better documentation likewise stays hidden in this gap.
Complaints: where the amounts get highest
When a product is the subject of a complaint because a user did something wrong, an uncomfortable question is worth asking: did the operating manual describe the correct procedure clearly? Could an averagely qualified user have understood and avoided the problem?
If the answer is no, the documentation has a seat at the table. Recall, rework, warranty handling, and reputational damage arise from several sources at once; poor documentation is one of them. Had the manual been comprehensible, many of these complaints would not have happened. No set of accounts shows this avoided effort.
Then there is the legal aspect. When a serious incident occurs and it is examined whether the company met its information obligations, the operating manual should pass this examination. The question then becomes a question of liability. At that moment, documentation quality was suddenly very expensive or very cheap.
Translations: what the lopsided source text costs
Translation costs are clearly visible in technical documentation. A considerable share of these costs goes back to poor source texts, which often gets lost in the internal discussion.
Every inconsistent term is translated several times, once per language version and once with every update. When a component is called „safety valve“ in one place in the German source text, „pressure-relief valve“ in another, and „pressure limiter“ in a third, three translation entries arise where one would suffice. In translation-memory systems this leads to lower match rates and thus directly to higher costs per word.
A well-maintained terminology base is therefore the cheapest lever on the translation bill that I know of. Building it costs time once; after that it pays off with every translation order. tekom has published practical materials on this that are also suitable for smaller writing departments. tekom, terminology work in technical documentation
Start-up at the customer’s site: the underestimated item
A category discussed even more rarely is start-up costs. When a product is put into operation at the customer’s site and the necessary information is missing or wrong, effort arises at the customer, at the supplier, and at the service team.
Typical constellations: the service technician has to call from on site because the manual does not describe a step. A parameterisation error arises because setting values are documented nowhere. A machine is stopped because nobody knows how to handle an error message. These costs go directly back to missing or faulty documentation.
For machines with long commissioning times, this adds up quickly. Consistently revised fault-diagnosis documentation has an immediate effect on the number of service calls, because many standard questions are resolved directly at the screen. Which calls drop away can be predicted once the most common reasons for calls have been categorised.
The blind spot in all this: these costs are almost never attributed to the documentation. They appear as service hours, as field-service travel costs, or as a goodwill gesture. Nobody in the accounting draws the connection to the operating manual. A simple feedback loop with the service team helps here: a categorisation of service calls by cause. The share that goes back to information deficiencies regularly comes as a surprise. That is the start of a well-founded argument for investing in better documentation processes.
Regulation: when the authority asks
Another category barely features in the business discussion: the effort involved in market surveillance or a conformity problem. This effort concerns the EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 as much as other product regulations.
When a product cannot present a conformant operating manual during an inspection, the consequences are considerable: a sales stop, a recall, an obligation to rectify. The regular documentation budgets pale beside this. Everything worth knowing about what the new regulation concretely requires I have described in the article on the EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230.
ISO/IEC 82079-1, as the standard for user information, provides a good framework for what an operating manual has to deliver in terms of content. ISO/IEC 82079-1, preparation of information for use Anyone who checks their documentation against this standard reduces the conformity risk considerably. The standard applies independently of the product, and therefore also outside the EU Machinery Regulation. It is thus a good general anchor for quality. tekom regularly publishes background information on the state of standardisation. tekom, standards and guidelines in technical documentation
Multiplication: why poor documentation gets more expensive with every reuse
In modern writing departments, documentation is built modularly and reused in many contexts. The same block appears in several manuals, in several product variants, in several languages. When the block is good, all subsequent documents benefit. When it is poor, the whole company pays for it several times over.
An unclear warning that feeds ten manuals does not produce the same service call ten times. It produces more, because it meets ten product variants with different user groups, each producing its own queries. An inconsistent term in twenty language versions raises the translation costs twentyfold and drags its own correction efforts behind it with every language update. A wrongly described setting parameter in several service manuals causes the same errors in commissioning across years in different plants.
This gives a second blind spot alongside the spread across cost centres: the spread across reuse. Anyone running a high degree of modularity multiplies every documentation error by the number of reuses. A correction at the source is therefore the biggest lever a company can pull in its documentation. The effect rarely becomes visible, because the savings flow into the same invisible cost centres as the follow-on costs.
AI: why poor documentation now gets even more expensive
One development sharpens the topic in the medium term: the uncritical use of AI in technical writing. Anyone who lets AI loose on poor source texts quickly gets a great deal of poor text in greater volume. Faster to market, with the same flaws, multiplied across all generated outputs.
That is why the foundation is decisive: clean source texts, maintained terminology, defined quality criteria. Only once this base is in place can AI in technical writing be used sensibly. Without this base, AI tools multiply the follow-on costs of poor documentation.
The old saying applies here more than ever: garbage in, garbage out.
Conclusion: avoidance is the real lever
If you want to make the case in your company for better documentation processes or corresponding investments, don’t have that conversation only with the documentation department. Have it with the service area, with quality management, and, if possible, with controlling.
The question you should ask: where in your company does effort arise that goes back to missing or faulty information? You don’t even have to use the word „documentation“. Talk about service calls that could have been avoided. About translation orders that were more expensive than necessary because the terminology was inconsistent. About start-up problems at the customer’s site that required rework.
This is a language controlling understands. It usually does not understand the cost question of the documentation department as long as it thinks only in staff costs and licences. Anyone who makes the hidden follow-on costs visible is having a different conversation.
It is also worth looking at the order-to-cash process. As long as the technical documentation is not finished, the product may, as a rule, not ship. A poorly set-up documentation department is therefore a bottleneck in the payment cycle. This connection is immediately understandable to those responsible for finance and makes the investment argument considerably easier.
The most important insight is contained in the second clause of the opening paragraph: anyone who frames poor documentation only as a cost problem overlooks the real lever. It is about an invisible item that first has to be made visible. Good documentation avoids complaints, it avoids additional translation costs, it avoids service effort. Nobody puts this avoided effort on the balance sheet. That makes it the most valuable item on the ledger, because otherwise nobody notices it.
A simple way in: take the last ten service calls or complaints and check how many of them complete and correct operating instructions would have prevented or reduced. The result usually surprises. It is an argument that controlling understands, because it describes concrete cases and concrete efforts rather than abstract quality terms.
The next step would be to capture this connection systematically. A regular evaluation does that. It needs no elaborate process. A simple categorisation in the service-ticket system is enough to have robust data within three to six months. With this data, you can have a conversation in controlling that is no longer based on gut feeling.
If you need support with this, I am available.
Before the next tool is bought
In technical writing departments, it is rarely the tool that decides. The data base and process maturity decide. Schübeler Consulting examines your concrete situation: degree of modularity, terminology, interfaces, staffing setup. The result is a recommendation with which you can justify your next investment robustly.
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— Johann Jörgen Schübeler, Schübeler Consulting