Before you buy another tool, it's worth spending one afternoon finding out where your time actually goes. That is all an automation audit is: a clear, honest look at the repetitive work in your business, ranked by what it's worth to fix.
You can run one yourself. Here's how.
What you need
- Two to three hours
- The people who do the day-to-day work (even if that's just you)
- A spreadsheet or a wall of sticky notes
- A list of the tools you pay for
Step 1: List the repeat work (45 minutes)
Go through a normal week, department by department, and write down every task that happens more than once a week. Be specific. "Admin" is not a task. "Copy new orders from email into the spreadsheet" is.
Prompts that help:
- What do you do every morning before the real work starts?
- What do you copy from one place to another?
- What do customers ask you over and over?
- What do you chase people for?
- What report do you build by hand?
- What gets forgotten when you're busy?
Ask the people who do the work, not just the managers. The real process almost never matches the official one, and the workarounds are where the time goes.
Step 2: Score each task (45 minutes)
For each task, add three scores from 1 to 5:
| Score | Frequency | Time per week | Cost when it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monthly | Under 30 min | Mild annoyance |
| 3 | Weekly | 1 to 3 hours | Delays or rework |
| 5 | Several times a day | 5+ hours | Lost sales, unhappy customers, compliance risk |
Then add a fourth column: how rule-based is it? If the task follows clear steps most of the time, it's a strong candidate. If it needs judgement every time, AI can help prepare, but a person should decide.
Sort by the total. The top five are your shortlist.
Step 3: Map the top task end to end (45 minutes)
Take the highest-scoring task and draw every step: who does what, in which tool, and what triggers the next step. Mark three things:
- Waiting points, where work sits in an inbox
- Copying points, where information is retyped
- Decision points, where someone has to think
This is the moment to simplify. Many processes have steps that exist only because "that's how we've always done it". Remove those first. Automating a bad process just makes the mistakes faster.
Step 4: Decide what to build (30 minutes)
For the simplified process, decide:
- The trigger: what starts it (a form, an email, a payment, a date)
- The automated steps: the copying, sorting, drafting and notifying
- The human steps: approvals and judgement calls
- The measure: the number that tells you it worked, such as response time or hours saved
Check what your existing tools can already do. Accounting software, CRMs and booking tools often have automation built in. Connectors like Make, Zapier or n8n link the rest. AI fits best in the middle: reading messages, drafting replies, summarising and sorting.
What you should leave with
- A ranked list of repetitive tasks
- One simplified, mapped workflow
- A clear trigger, steps and owner for your first automation
- A number to measure before and after
Common traps
Starting with the fun task. An AI-written newsletter is exciting; automatic invoice reminders make money.
Automating exceptions. Build for the 80% of cases that follow the pattern and send the rest to a person.
No owner. Every automation needs someone who checks it works and updates it when the business changes.
Skipping the "before" number. Without it you'll never know if it was worth it.
Want help?
An afternoon gets you most of the way. If you'd rather have someone run it with your team, map the workflows and build the first automations, that's exactly what our automation audits do. Book a free 30-minute call and we'll start with your biggest time sink.
