What Should I Automate in My Small Business?

If you want to introduce automation into your business, you do not need to start with the largest or most complicated process. Some of the most useful opportunities are ordinary tasks that happen repeatedly throughout the week and take a little bit of someone’s time every time they occur.

The challenge is identifying which work is worth automating and which work benefits from having a person involved.

Look for work that happens the same way every time

A good place to start is with tasks that are both repetitive and predictable. Think about work your employees perform regularly where the steps rarely change.

A customer submits a form and someone sends a confirmation. An employee receives an order and creates a record somewhere else. Someone checks whether an invoice has been paid and sends a reminder. A report is prepared from the same information every week. Files are downloaded, renamed, and moved into the appropriate folders.

None of these tasks may seem particularly significant on their own. The problem is that small tasks become expensive when they happen dozens or hundreds of times.

If someone spends five minutes performing a task several times a day, that can turn into hours of work over the course of a month. It also interrupts whatever else that employee was doing.

Pay attention to work people do between applications

Another useful place to look is wherever an employee acts as the connection between two pieces of software.

A customer may submit information through your website, but someone has to enter it into your CRM. Your accounting software may contain payment information, but someone checks it manually before updating another system. An employee may download a report from one application so the information can be added to a spreadsheet.

When the information already exists somewhere in the business, ask why someone needs to enter, move, or recreate it somewhere else.

There may be a good reason. The second system may require different information, an employee may need to verify something first, or the applications may not be able to communicate with each other. Understanding why the manual step exists will tell you whether automation is appropriate.

Look for waiting and checking

Not all repetitive work involves entering information. Employees also spend time checking whether something has happened.

Someone may check for new orders, look to see whether a customer has responded, verify that a document has been approved, check whether a payment has arrived, or repeatedly look at another system for a status change.

In many cases, the employee does not need to perform the check at all. What they really need is to know when something changes.

A notification, reminder, or automatic next step can reduce the amount of time employees spend checking systems and help prevent something important from being overlooked.

Don’t automate a bad process

A process can be repetitive without being well designed.

If employees have developed a complicated series of steps because the existing process does not work very well, automating every one of those steps may simply make a poor process run faster.

Before automating something, ask why each step exists and what would happen if it were removed. You may discover that a report is no longer used, an approval was added years ago for a reason that no longer applies, or information is being maintained in two places when only one is necessary.

Sometimes improving the process eliminates the need to automate part of it.

Start with something useful and manageable

Your first automation does not need to transform the business. It should solve a clear problem that happens often enough to matter.

Choose something employees recognize as frustrating. Understand how it works today, why each step exists, and what you would prefer to happen instead. Then decide which parts are predictable enough to happen automatically and which parts still require someone’s attention.

Once that process is working well, you can look for the next opportunity.

Over time, removing small amounts of unnecessary work can have a larger effect than trying to automate everything at once. The goal is not to have the most automated business. It is to give people less unnecessary work so they can spend more of their time on the work that actually needs them.