The processes almost every business can automate

A list without numbers always sounds equally good. "Automate invoicing" stays a nice idea until someone does the arithmetic. At 12 invoices a month it is worth 24 minutes. That is why every workflow below carries an order of magnitude, and you can hold each one against your own business in two minutes.

The numbers come from projects in trades, retail, law firms and agencies. They are ranges rather than promises. Where your business differs, that is not a flaw in the list, it is exactly the information you are after.

How to read the numbers

Every workflow gets three figures: how long one case takes by hand, how often it occurs, and the share an automation realistically takes over. The third figure is what tips most calculations, because it almost never reaches 100 percent.

Those three turn into a yearly number, and the arithmetic is simple. Minutes per case times cases per year times the share that falls away. The result is hours, and hours get multiplied by your internal cost. If you have no figure for that, 40 euros is a workable start, because overheads and downtime are already in there.

Area 1: everything that starts with an enquiry

This is where the largest sum sits in most businesses. The individual cases are short and still occur every single day, and that combination is what nobody notices.

• Receiving, sorting and acknowledging enquiries. Budget 4 to 6 minutes per enquiry once you add up reading, entering it into a second system, and the acknowledgement. At 10 enquiries a day that is over 200 hours a year. Realistically 80 percent of it goes away, because the routing is rule based. The side effect often weighs more than the time: an acknowledgement after 30 seconds keeps customers from asking two competitors in parallel.
• Booking, confirming and reminding about appointments. With the back and forth, one appointment costs 6 to 10 minutes. At 8 appointments a week that is around 60 hours a year, and roughly 70 percent can be taken over. Finding a slot is rule based, while the special cases stay with a person. The reminder 24 hours ahead also cuts the number of appointments nobody shows up for.
• Following up on open quotes. The time involved is small, namely 2 to 3 minutes per follow-up. That is why the hourly calculation misleads on this line. The value sits in the quotes that would otherwise stay unanswered, because nobody remembers day ten.

Area 2: everything to do with money

These workflows are already structured in almost every business, because they have to be. That makes them the technically easiest candidates, even though they feel harder.

• Producing quotes. Between 15 and 30 minutes per quote, and most of that is pure transcription. The data already sits in the measurements, in the customer's email or in the price list. At 6 quotes a week that is a good 100 hours a year. Because prices and wording need approval, around 60 percent falls away rather than 90. The draft appears on its own, the sign-off stays with you.
• Issuing invoices and matching payments. Each invoice takes 4 to 6 minutes. On top comes the month-end matching, which eats between 1 and 3 hours depending on volume. 85 percent is realistic here, because amount, customer and reference can be compared by machine. What remains are the part payments and the transfers without a reference.
• Collecting receipts and passing them to the accountant. One to 2 minutes per receipt for pulling it out, renaming it and filing it. At 80 receipts a month that is around 30 hours a year, and 90 percent of it goes away. That is the highest figure in this whole list, because the workflow contains not a single decision. The real gain: the work no longer piles up until month end.

Area 3: everything that sits between two systems

These workflows appear on no task list, because they have no name. Day to day they are called "just copying it across", and they are still often the most expensive line in the business.

• Moving data from one system into another. From the shop into accounting, from the form into the CRM, from the spreadsheet into inventory: budget 2 to 4 minutes per record. At 20 records a week that is about 50 hours a year, and 95 percent of it falls away. There is also an effect no hourly calculation shows. The transposed digits disappear, the ones that creep in while typing and surface weeks later.
• Putting reports together. Pulling figures from three sources, getting them into a table, formatting it: 60 to 120 minutes a month. That is up to 24 hours a year, of which 90 percent goes away. Nothing about that work is creative. The interpretation stays with you, and it gets better once the figures are there every Monday instead of once a quarter.
• Keeping master data identical across systems. A new address or a new contact person travels into two to four programs, 3 to 5 minutes each. The effort looks small, the damage from one forgotten place does not. This is exactly where invoices to old addresses come from. Around 85 percent can be taken over.

Area 4: everything that recurs and still starts from scratch

The last two workflows cost less time than the ones above. In exchange, forgetting them gets expensive.

• Setting up a new customer, project or employee. Creating folders, granting access, working through a checklist, writing a welcome email: 30 to 60 minutes per case. At 2 cases a month that is around 20 hours a year, and 70 percent of it runs without you. More important than the hours is that no step gets forgotten because things happened to be busy.
• Keeping an eye on deadlines, maintenance and contracts. No minutes count here, only the date that slips through. A notice period or a due service is rarely dramatic on its own. Together they cost more than most of the workflows above, and a reminder in the right place is built in an afternoon.

What it adds up to

Take the three lines that occur in almost every business: handling enquiries, producing quotes and moving data. At the orders of magnitude above that is 200, 100 and 50 hours a year, so 350 in total. After subtracting the share that stays manual, you land at roughly 250 hours.

At 40 euros of internal cost that is 10,000 euros of working time a year, minus what the automations cost to run. This is only a worked example, but the structure behind it stays the same. It explains why the question is rarely whether something is worth it. The question is which workflow goes first.

What comes on top every month depends above all on what your platform counts. The full calculation with all four items is in what an automation really costs.

The most expensive line is almost never the longest task, but the shortest one with the highest frequency.

The workflows deliberately left off the list

Four kinds of work are missing above, and not by accident. For them the automation costs more than it returns, no matter who builds it.

• Anything rare. A workflow that occurs twice a year gets done twice a year. Even a perfect automation saves 40 minutes here and costs a day.
• Anything decided differently each time. If the description starts with "it depends", the workflow has not been settled yet. Automating it would lock in one of several variants, usually the wrong one.
• Anything that starts on paper. As long as the first step is a handwritten note, the lever is the form and not the software. That is often half the automation already, and it costs next to nothing.
• Anything that reaches the customer and binds you legally. Price commitments, contract wording and terminations belong in the second round. Even then a person looks at it before it goes out.

In fairness a fifth case belongs here. Sometimes a workflow is only laborious because an existing program is set up badly. The automation is then a plaster, and the cause can be fixed more cheaply. Saying so costs me work, but it is the right answer.

What to do with this list now

Go through the ten lines and write your own numbers behind each: minutes, frequency, and the share you consider realistic. It takes half an hour. It is revealing every time anyway, because the ranking at the end is rarely the one you expected.

After that you have three candidates and the question of which one goes first. That decision matters more than the choice of tool, and the criteria are in which tasks to automate first. If one workflow stands out because it constantly calls for its own judgement, the question is a different one, namely AI agent or automation.

You may prefer comparing against a finished workflow instead of doing the maths yourself. The page on automation explains how such a project runs and what it costs. That someone has to look at it later, when an interface changes, is part of the truth and sits under operations and support.