The repetitive internal work — copying data between systems, chasing handoffs, assembling the same report every month — handled by software instead of by someone on your team.
More clients means more data copied from one system to another. More jobs means someone spends Tuesday morning assembling the report that could have assembled itself. More volume means more handoffs, more chasing, more “did anyone action that?” in a group chat.
So you hire. And the new person spends a meaningful share of their week on tasks that a computer should be doing, which means your cost base grows in step with your revenue. That’s not scaling — it’s just getting bigger.
The question worth asking isn’t “could this be automated?” Almost anything could. It’s “what is this actually costing us, and would automating it pay for itself?”
This is the calculation that decides whether an automation is worth building. It takes five minutes and it’s the single most useful thing on this page.
Per week, honestly. Not the busy weeks — the average.
Including the context-switching around it, which is usually underestimated. A “five minute” task that interrupts focused work costs more than five minutes.
Salary plus employer’s NI, pension and overhead. A £30,000 salary is roughly £20 an hour loaded, not £15.
A task done 10 times a week, taking 12 minutes, at £20/hour loaded = 2 hours a week = £2,080 a year.
If automating that costs £2,800 plus £250 a month running, that’s £5,800 in year one against £2,080 saved. It doesn’t pay back until year three. Don’t build it.
A task happening 40 times a week and taking 15 minutes: 10 hours a week, £10,400 a year. That pays for itself in under four months.
The threshold, roughly: automation earns its place when the task consumes more than about four hours a week in total, or when the cost of getting it wrong is high. Below that, a person doing it is genuinely cheaper — and we’ll tell you so rather than build it anyway.
One thing the maths misses: some processes are worth automating even when the hours are modest, because human error in them is expensive. Invoicing, compliance records, anything where a missed step costs real money. Judgement applies.
We map where your team’s time actually goes and what each task costs.
Which processes earn automation and which are cheaper left alone.
Documented and agreed before automating, because automating a broken process locks it in.
Automations built across the tools you already use, with error handling.
Run alongside the manual process until it’s demonstrably reliable.
Automations drift as the business changes. We watch and update them.
It probably isn’t right yet if the process isn’t consistent — automating something nobody has agreed the shape of makes the confusion permanent. And if the maths above doesn’t work, don’t build it. Those are the two most common reasons we advise against.
It depends most on phase three. Automation needs structured, consistent data to work with, and a CRM set up properly is usually what provides it. Where the data is inconsistent, the first job is fixing that — which is Convert work, not Automate work, and we’d rather do it in the right order.
If your systems are already in good shape, you can start here. Plenty of businesses come to us with a working CRM and just want the repetitive work taken off their team.
| Feature | Essential | Most Popular Growth | Advanced | Custom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | £1,200 | £2,800 | £5,500 | From£10,000 |
| Scope | One or two simple automations | Several connected workflows, multiple tools | Complex multi-step processes, custom logic | Bespoke |
| Tools connected | Up to 2 | Up to 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Ongoing monitoring and tuning: £250–£750/month. Platform and LLM usage billed at cost, in your name.
Get a free automation audit. We’ll map where your team’s time goes, run the payback calculation on each process, and tell you which ones are worth building — including when the answer is none of them yet.
We reply within one working day.
No spam, no pitch deck.