When I first walked into the Finance Office on the Global Mercy, it didn’t take long to realize that some of our processes were clunky. Actually, “clunky” might be too kind. Many of them were slow, frustrating, and flat‑out inefficient.
Paying bills can take days with the back and forth. Running day crew payroll ate up more than a day. Handling deductions or insurance fees could stretch on and on. Every cycle, we’d spend hours bogged down in the same steps, repeating the same frustrations.
Being around finance systems for a long time, both in nonprofits and in tech companies, one thing I’ve been taught is that inefficiency eats away at more than just time. It eats away at morale. It makes people feel like they’re spinning their wheels. And when you’re a volunteer — when you’ve left your home, your career, and your family to serve on a hospital ship in West Africa — you don’t want to feel like your energy is being wasted.
So early on in our first year here, we made it our goal to simplify.
Why Good Habits Matter
Before getting into the technical fixes, I need to explain why I cared so much about habits. Because this wasn’t just about saving hours on a spreadsheet. It was about changing the culture of our team.
If you’ve ever been part of an overworked team, you know the default mode: heads down, just get through today, don’t think about tomorrow. When you’re that busy, you don’t stop to ask, “Could this be done better?”
That’s why good habits matter. Good habits create margin. And margin gives you space to breathe. Space to think. Space to notice when others need help. Without that margin, we never could have said yes when the hospital came knocking.
Cutting Down the Big Time Sinks
Take day crew payroll. Every two weeks, we pay about 300 day crew — Sierra Leoneans who work alongside us in everything from hospital wards to deck operations to the galley. Before, the stipend process took 10–12 hours. Each cycle. We’d sit in the office for a full day, sometimes two, checking and rechecking spreadsheets, transferring information, typing things in by hand.
Afew a few months of retooling, we cut that process down to three or four hours. Same work. Fewer headaches. Fewer errors and challenges, too.
Or take insurance fee deductions for a subset of crew. What used to take two days now takes about five to six hours. That’s not just time saved — that’s a day of someone’s life every month, freed up to do something else.
Even journal entries were streamlined. We used to type every single one manually into our accounting system. Painful. But we already had the data in Excel. All we had to do was reformat it and import it. Suddenly, what took hours took minutes. This reduced the risk of errors, too.
Beyond Efficiency: Building Up the Team
But it wasn’t just about processes. It was about people.
Simplifying gave us the freedom to invest in the team. Instead of always being buried in tasks, we could think about growth. I could encourage them to take ownership of projects, to learn new skills, to pursue continuing education. Sometimes that meant giving them more responsibility. Other times it meant stepping out of the way and letting them run with it.
I wanted them to know Mercy Ships had their back — not just as accountants, but as people. That meant celebrating wins, encouraging them to take classes, and reminding them they didn’t always need my permission to make improvements.
How Simplifying Creates Opportunity
Here’s the bigger picture: without those improvements, we never could have helped the hospital the way we did this year. Those “small” improvements during our first year created the margin to help the Hospital to second year.
If I’d been underwater, buried in paperwork and 12‑hour day crew stipend days, I wouldn’t have had the time or energy to notice their struggles, much less offer to help. And if our team hadn’t built a track record of success — real, measurable improvements — no one would have trusted us to jump into hospital processes.
But because we had margin, we could say yes. Because we had success stories, we could point to them and say, “Look, we’ve done it here. We can do it for you.”
That’s why good habits matter. Not because they look neat on a report, but because they create opportunity — opportunity to serve beyond your department, opportunity to step into someone else’s burden, opportunity to make a difference where it’s most needed.
The Irony of Spreadsheets in West Africa
Some of you might be thinking, “Why spreadsheets? Haven’t we moved beyond that?” In the U.S. or Europe, there are countless cloud systems that automate payroll, reporting, and scheduling. But in West Africa, things are different. Internet is slow and unreliable. Power can cut out. Cloud systems that look great in marketing brochures just don’t work here. Or they don’t serve the currencies or needs of the country.
Excel works offline. It’s shareable. It’s flexible. And everyone has at least some familiarity with it. It’s not perfect, but in this environment, it’s often the best tool we have. And when you learn how to really use it, it’s powerful.
So yes, a lot of our work has been in spreadsheets. It might sound nerdy. It might even sound boring. But those spreadsheets free up time, reduce stress, and help people go home earlier. And that matters.
Looking Back
At the beginning of the first yer, our team felt the workload and laundry list of tasks. Processes dragged. Everything was reactive. By the end of the year, we had space. We had margin. We had stories of success we could point to and say, “We made things better.”
That shift changed our trajectory. It gave us the ability to help the hospital. It gave us credibility when we offered ideas. And it reminded me of something I’d nearly forgotten: sometimes the most missionary thing you can do is simplify a process, so someone else has time to breathe.
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