Automation
That task someone repeats by hand every day stops existing. Without changing the software you already use and without your team having to learn anything new.
Repetitive work does not appear on any line of the accounts. Nobody invoices “two hours a day copying data”, so it looks free. But it is not.
One person spending 2 hours a day on a manual task, at a cost to the company of €20 an hour, comes to about €9,000 a year — for that one task, for that one person.
The right question is not how much it costs to automate, but in how many months it pays for itself. With those numbers, a two-thousand-euro automation pays for itself in about three months and from then on it works for free, every year.
And there is a cost that does not even show up there: mistakes. An order typed wrongly, a duplicated invoice, a quote sent with the old price. That costs money and, above all, it costs customers.
What gets automated
It is not about sectors, but about ways of losing time. If you recognise any of them, there are hours in it.
From email to Excel, from Excel to the invoicing software, from a form to the diary. It is the most automatable task there is and the one that causes the most typing errors.
Orders that arrive by email and enter the system on their ownQuotes, contracts, delivery notes, reports. Four details change and the rest is a template.
From half an hour per quote to two minutesOpening hours, timeframes, availability, the status of an order. Questions that already have a written answer somewhere.
WhatsApp replies and only passes on to you what needs judgementEmail, incidents, requests. Someone spends a while every morning deciding whose each item is.
Every email arrives already labelled and with a draft replyQuotes with no reply, unpaid invoices, unconfirmed appointments. They are always forgotten because they are not urgent until it is too late.
Automatic follow-up that recovers sales that were already lostDownloading, cross-checking and laying out the same data over and over.
On the 1st it is in your inbox, doneNot everything is worth it, and starting with the wrong thing is the fastest way for an automation project to end up half-finished. I rank the candidates by four criteria:
That produces an ordered list. We start with what hurts most and can be seen working within a few days, not with the big project that takes six months to show signs of life.
I tell you before charging you, not afterwards:
How I work
Half an hour with the person who does the task, not only with the person who manages. The one who does it knows where the real exceptions are.
What gets automated, how many hours a month it recovers, what it costs and in how many months it pays for itself. Fixed price within 24 hours.
The first piece working in days, not months. It is tested with real work before carrying on to extend it.
The real exceptions show up when it is used. They are corrected, and it stays with alerts in case something fails.
Until recently, automating meant RPA: software that imitated a person’s clicks on a screen. It worked, but it was fragile — all it took was the supplier moving one button for everything to stop working.
It also had a hard limit: it only worked for tidy data. An email written by a person, a delivery note photographed on a phone or an order in free format were left out, and that is precisely where most of the time goes in a small business.
That is what has changed. Now the untidy can be automated too: reading an email and understanding what it asks for, pulling the data out of a scanned document, writing a draft reply.
The change shows in how people search: queries about AI agents have multiplied by more than fifteen in the last year, while those about RPA have fallen to a third. It is not a headline fashion: it is that it now works for cases where it did not before.
With judgement, though. AI is used where something has to be interpreted; the rest of the process runs on direct connections between systems, which are cheaper, faster and do not fail. You can see how I apply it to the first contact with the customer on the AI chatbot for business page.
Common questions
It depends on how many systems have to be connected and how many exceptions the process has. The usual range for a specific automation runs from a few hundred to a few thousand euros. What matters is not that figure but the return: in the first meeting we work out how many hours a month it recovers and in how many months it pays for itself. If the sums do not work, I tell you.
No. I work on top of what you already have: your invoicing, your CRM, your email, your spreadsheets. The automation sits in the middle and connects the pieces. Changing systems is expensive, slow and creates resistance in the team; it is almost never needed.
There is usually an alternative. Many can export automatically or have some way of taking data in. When there is none, the surrounding part can still be automated even if the central system stays as it is. I check this before quoting, not afterwards.
In a small business, almost never. What happens is that the person who spent two hours a day copying data spends them looking after customers or selling. If your aim is to reduce staff, I am probably not the right supplier: my projects pay off when they free up time, not when they eliminate it.
Everything I set up has alerts: if something breaks, you know and I know, and you do not find out from an angry customer. And the manual route is always still available, so that a one-off failure does not bring you to a halt.
It is similar, but not the same. Classic RPA imitates a person’s clicks on a screen and breaks as soon as the interface changes. What I build connects the systems underneath, which is more stable, and uses AI only where something unstructured has to be interpreted, such as an email written by a person.
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Start here
Half an hour at no cost. We leave with the sums done: how many hours a month are recovered and how long it takes to pay for itself. If it does not pay off, I will tell you.