How many providers are running your business?
Tick off the bookkeepers, accountants, HR advisors, IT support and others you rely on. We'll map your provider network, estimate the coordination time it costs you, and show where consolidation could help.
~2 minutes · No login to start
Finance
People
Operations
Growth
About this tool
Provider Fragmentation Score
Most Australian small businesses don't decide to run on six or eight separate providers — they accumulate them. A bookkeeper here, a payroll bureau there, an accountant for the year-end, an IT company, an HR consultant when someone needs managing, an insurance broker, a marketing agency. Each is competent in its lane. The problem is that none of them talk to each other, so the owner quietly becomes the integration layer — the only person connected to every part of the business.
How it works
The Provider Fragmentation Score asks you to tick the external providers currently touching your business across the four back-office areas: finance, people, operations and growth. It maps those providers as a network and reflects back how fragmented your arrangement is and where the coordination load falls. The score isn't a judgement — plenty of businesses genuinely need several providers — it's a way of seeing, in one picture, how much of your week goes into holding the arrangement together rather than running the business.
Who it’s for
Owners and managers of growing Australian SMEs who suspect that too much comes back to them, and want to see their provider set-up laid out plainly.
- Counts your providers across finance, people, operations and growth and shows them as a connected map.
- Surfaces the hidden coordination cost of a fragmented set-up — the hours, hand-offs and gaps between vendors.
- Helps you decide where consolidating onto one accountable team would actually pay off, and where it wouldn't.
Frequently asked questions
How many providers should a small business have?
There's no single right number — it depends on your size and complexity. What matters more than the count is whether the providers are coordinated. Six vendors who share context and one point of contact is a very different experience from six who each hold a slice of the truth and leave the owner to stitch them together. The tool helps you see which situation you're in.
What is the coordination cost the tool refers to?
It's the time and effort of being the human glue between providers — forwarding information between them, re-explaining the business to each one, and catching the things that fall in the gaps. It rarely shows up on an invoice, which is why most owners never add it up. We describe it in full on our page about the coordination tax.
Does using fewer providers always save money?
Not automatically. The saving comes from removing the coordination burden and the gaps, not simply from having fewer contracts. For some businesses several specialist providers is the right answer. The value of the tool is helping you tell the difference for your business.