The Cost of Manual GRC: A Quantitative Analysis

Spreadsheet-based GRC feels cheap because the line items are invisible. Quantify them and the picture changes.

The costs nobody tracks

• Reconciliation labor — the hours spent making two versions of the same register agree.
• Audit response — every clarification request that traces back to a missing or stale entry.
• Decision delay — the deals, hires, and launches gated on a risk sign-off that took three weeks instead of three days.

The number

For a 1,000-person regulated enterprise, our model puts the all-in cost of manual GRC at $4.2M to $6.8M annually — a band, not a point estimate, because the decision-delay component varies most by industry.