Where the time actually goes
Ask anyone in an office what they did last Tuesday and a surprising amount of the answer is moving information from one place to another. Copying figures from an email into a spreadsheet. Retyping a supplier invoice. Building the same report as last month, by hand, from the same three sources. Sending the reminder, then the second reminder.
None of it is difficult, which is exactly why it survives. Each task takes ten minutes, so nobody ever sets aside the week it would take to remove it. Add them up across a team and it is often a day a week, spent on work that produces nothing a customer would notice except the mistakes.
Automate the rule, keep the judgement
The honest version of automation is narrower than the brochures suggest. A step is a good candidate when:
- The rule can be written down. If the answer is always "take this figure, put it there, send it on the first of the month", a computer should be doing it.
- It happens often. A monthly task that takes an hour is worth less than a daily one that takes ten minutes.
- Mistakes are expensive or embarrassing. Retyped numbers are where errors come from.
A step is a poor candidate when somebody's judgement is doing real work. Deciding whether a client gets more time to pay, or whether a quote needs a second look, is not admin. We leave those alone deliberately, and build the automation so the person making the call has what they need in front of them.
What that has looked like in practice
- Retyping from documents. A meaningful share of the admin at an accountancy practice was people typing out information that already existed in a PDF. Two document extraction services, one for invoices and one for catalogue data, now do that first pass.
- Re-keying from paper. Field engineers' job sheets used to come back at the end of the week to be typed into Excel. The mobile app that replaced them produces a record the office can use directly, with no re-keying.
- Reading a tender pack. For a construction and M&E group, AI-assisted tender analysis lets an estimator get through a document set that used to take days. The same platform includes a marketing automation application.
The pattern is the same each time: find the point where a person is acting as a cable between two systems, and replace the cable.
Automation that fails loudly
The risk with automated work is not that it breaks. It is that it breaks quietly, and you find out a month later that the invoices stopped going out.
So everything we automate keeps a record of what it did, reports when it could not do something rather than skipping it, and can be re-run safely if a step fails halfway, without sending the same reminder twice or posting the same figure twice. Where it touches money or anything a customer sees, it is covered by tests. And there is always a way for a person to see what is queued, what went out and what is waiting on them.
Where it lives
Sometimes automation is a small service that runs on a schedule and talks to systems you already have. That usually means integration work with the accounting, payment or CRM products you pay for. Sometimes it turns out the reason everything is manual is that there is no single system holding the truth, and the job is to build that first.
We will say which one it is at the start. If an off-the-shelf automation tool would do the job for a few pounds a month, you will hear that too.
Scope and price
Fixed price, off a written scope that lists each process being automated, what triggers it, and what should happen when it goes wrong. Engagements start from £4,000; a single well-defined process sits towards that end, and a reorganisation of how several systems share work sits higher. The more precisely you can describe the current steps, the tighter the price, and the brief guide covers what to send.