Automation audit
A two-week review that measures where your team's hours actually go and returns a written process map plus a scored shortlist of what is worth automating. You keep the report and can act on it with us, in-house, or with anyone else.
Why start with an audit rather than a build?
Because most automation projects are scoped from what the manager believes the process is, and the process is never that. There is always an exception nobody documented, a spreadsheet that three people depend on, and a step that exists because of a customer complaint in 2021.
Building against the imagined process produces an automation that handles 70% of cases and quietly dumps the other 30% on someone's desk. The audit exists to find the 30% first.
The second reason is arithmetic. If we cannot tell you how many hours a process costs today, we cannot honestly claim to have saved you any. The audit sets the baseline that everything afterwards is measured against.
What happens during the two weeks
- Kickoff, 60 minutes. Scope which processes are in and out. Usually three to six, chosen because someone already suspects they are painful.
- Shadowing sessions. One to two hours each with the people who actually run the work. Not the manager describing it — the person doing it, screen shared, in real time.
- System inventory. Every tool the process touches, what its API can and cannot do, who holds the licence and what it costs.
- Time and volume baseline. How often the process runs, how long each step takes, how often it goes wrong and what happens when it does.
- Exception hunting. The deliberate search for the edge cases people handle by instinct. This is the part that determines whether a build succeeds.
- Written report and walkthrough. Delivered as a document, presented live, with time for your team to argue with it.
What you receive
- A process map per workflow, step by step, with systems and handoffs marked
- Current time cost per process, in hours per month
- A scored opportunity list: hours saved, error risk removed, effort to build, rough cost
- Explicit "do not automate" recommendations with the reasoning
- A sequencing recommendation — what to do first, second, third and why
- Notes on data quality problems that need fixing before any automation will work
What it costs
$2,500 for a focused audit of one or two processes in a small business.
$4,000 to $6,000 for a department-wide review covering four to six processes, multiple teams, or a stack with more than about eight systems in it.
Fixed price, quoted after the scoping call. If we later build for you, the audit fee is credited against the first build.
What an audit finding actually looks like
Before
A professional services firm processes new client onboarding by hand. The signed proposal arrives in email. An account manager creates a folder in Google Drive, sets up a project in Asana from a template, adds the client to HubSpot as a customer, raises the first invoice in Xero, and sends a welcome email with the kickoff scheduling link.
Measured: 38 minutes per client, five systems, done by three different people depending on who is free. Two to three clients a week. Roughly 8 hours a month, plus the delay when the person is on leave.
The finding
Four of the five steps are deterministic and triggered by the same event. The fifth — the welcome email — benefits from a human touch and should stay manual, but can be pre-drafted.
Recommendation: a single workflow triggered by proposal signature, building folder, project, CRM record and draft invoice in sequence, with the welcome email queued for one-click send. Estimated build $9,000 to $12,000. Estimated recovery around 7 hours a month plus consistency.
Also flagged: the Asana template is out of date and three service lines are missing from it. Fix that before building, or the automation will propagate the gap at scale.
Illustrative example of the format and level of detail an audit report contains. Real client work is published as case studies with permission.
Common questions
How much of our time will this take?
Around six to ten hours total across your team, concentrated in week one. The bulk of it is the shadowing sessions, which need the people who actually run the process rather than their manager. We work around your schedule and record sessions so nobody has to repeat themselves.
What if the audit concludes we should not automate anything?
Then that is the finding and you have saved yourself a build. It happens — usually when a process is about to change anyway, when the volume is too low to justify the engineering, or when the real problem is that two teams are duplicating work and should just stop. You still get the process map, which tends to be useful on its own.
Can we take the report to another vendor?
Yes. The report is written to be actionable by anyone, including your own team. We do not obfuscate it to force a follow-on sale. If you get a better build quote elsewhere with our map in hand, that is a reasonable outcome.
Do you charge for the audit if we go on to build with you?
The audit fee is credited in full against your first build project. So if the audit is $4,000 and the build is quoted at $14,000, the build invoice is $10,000.
Is the scoping call the same as the audit?
No. The scoping call is a free 30-minute conversation to work out whether there is enough here to be worth an audit and roughly what it would cover. The audit is the paid engagement that follows.
Book a scoping call
Thirty minutes, no charge. We will tell you whether an audit is worth doing and what it would cost in your situation.
Related: Workflow automation · Automation consulting · Pricing