Every business runs on a hundred small repetitive tasks: invoices, follow-ups, reports, copying data from one tool to another by hand. Each one feels too small to worry about. Added up across a year, they are usually the most expensive thing your team does.
Here is one task, in one small business, to show how the arithmetic goes.
- Invoices to chase each week
- 15
- Minutes each, checking and emailing
- 6
- Hours a week
- 1.5
- Hours a year
- 78
- At $45 an hour, that one task costs
- $3,510 a year
Nobody ever put that on a budget line, because it never arrived as a bill. It arrived as somebody’s Thursday afternoon, every Thursday.
Now put your own numbers in and add up the rest of them.
A conservative estimate: it assumes roughly 60% of repetitive admin is automatable across 46 working weeks. Your real number depends on the specific tasks, which is exactly what we work out on a first call.
What is worth automating
The best candidates are tasks that are frequent, rule-based and boring. Those are exactly the ones where people get slow and make mistakes, and where software does not.
- Moving data between tools that do not talk to each other.
- Sending the same emails: reminders, confirmations, follow-ups, review requests.
- Building the weekly or monthly report by hand.
- Chasing unpaid invoices.
