I have talked more clients out of automation than into it, and it is the best marketing I have ever done by accident. The fastest way to earn trust is to tell someone not to spend money, especially on the shiny thing they came in asking for.
Automation has a payback period, the same as a delivery van or an espresso machine for the office. If the thing you want to automate happens twice a month and takes ten minutes, the spreadsheet has already won. Automating it would be a hobby, and I have enough of those.
The three questions before we quote
- How often does this actually happen? Real number, not the dramatic one.
- What does it cost when a human does it, including the cost of doing it wrong?
- What will it cost to run and maintain the automation after the invoice is paid?
If the maintenance cost is bigger than the manual cost, we have just designed a more expensive way to do the same task, with the bonus of a pager that goes off at 2am. That is not a win. That is a subscription to a problem.
What is worth automating
High frequency, real stakes, and a stable process. The thing your team does fifty times a day, where a mistake is expensive and the steps do not change every week. That is where software earns its keep. The smoke tests, the reconciliation, the intake that gets duplicated across five systems by hand. Automate the boring high-volume work, leave the rare judgment calls to people.
The honest sign-off
I have automated other people's expense reports for a living and still not automated my own. The cobbler's kids, and so on. If you have tried everything and the manual process is still eating your week, call us. If it is eating ten minutes a fortnight, keep the spreadsheet and buy yourself a coffee with the difference.