When a business asks us where to start, the answer is rarely the project they came in with. Here is the test we use, and the five processes that pass it most often.
The test
A process is worth automating when all four of these are true:
- It happens often: daily or several times a week, not quarterly.
- It follows rules, not judgement. If two people would do it differently, it is not ready.
- It has a clear start and end. "Manage the inbox" fails this. "File every receipt from the inbox into the accounting folder" passes.
- Someone can tell you how long it currently takes. If nobody knows, measure it for a week first. Otherwise you will never know whether it worked.
1. Moving data between two systems
The classic. An order arrives in one place and someone retypes it into another. Every business has at least one of these, and it is usually invisible because it has always been done that way.
It is also the single most reliable win, because there is no ambiguity in the task and the errors it removes, such as typos in quantities or swapped prices, are the expensive kind.
2. Chasing the same follow-up
Unpaid invoices, unsigned quotations, unreturned enquiries. These get chased inconsistently because chasing is uncomfortable, and the ones that slip are pure lost revenue.
A scheduled reminder that fires on day 7, day 14 and day 30 without anyone having to feel awkward about it is not sophisticated. It just works.
3. The weekly report somebody assembles by hand
If a person opens four tabs every Monday to copy numbers into one summary, that is a script. The tools already have the numbers; someone is just being the glue.
4. Receipts and documents
Photographing a receipt, reading the total off it and filing it under the right category is the sort of task that is tedious for a person and easy for a machine now. This is one of the few on this list where a model earns its place, because the input is messy.
5. Onboarding a new customer or staff member
The same twelve things happen every time, and one of them always gets forgotten. A checklist that runs itself (accounts, folders, welcome message, first invoice) removes the forgetting rather than relying on someone to remember.
What not to automate yet
Anything where the rule is still being argued about internally. Automating a process you have not agreed on just encodes the disagreement and makes it harder to change. Sort out the process on paper first; the software part is the easy half.
And anything that happens twice a year. The build will cost more than the decade of doing it manually.
Where to start on Monday
Pick the one thing on this list that made you wince in recognition. Time it for a week. That number is your business case, and it is usually much bigger than people expect once they count.
