Automating Without Buying New Software: What You Can Clear Away Today
Automating doesn't have to mean buying something. Before spending, it pays to look at the repetitive work you can remove with what you already own: three concrete examples and a method for finding them in your own company.
“We should automate” is a sentence that almost always leads straight to a quote. And yet, in most companies, the first round of automation needs no new software at all: it needs a good look at what is being done by hand, and the removal of a piece of it.
That is an awkward position for someone who sells custom software, but it is the truth: buy a tool to automate a messy process and you get a faster messy process.
Here is how to find the automations that cost little or nothing, and how to tell when building something is genuinely the answer.
The method: one week of notes
For one week, ask the office to note down every time they do one of three things: retype data from one screen into another, write an email nearly identical to one they have written before, or hunt for information they know exists but can't remember where.
One line is enough: what, how long, how many times. By the end of the week you will have a list no consultancy can hand you, because that work is invisible from the outside: it has become normal.
Then sort by “times per week”, not by “minutes”. The work worth automating is the frequent kind, even when each instance takes two minutes.
Three automations you can build with what you already have
The replies you always write the same way. Every customer asks about opening hours, delivery times, payment terms. Nearly every mail client lets you save canned replies and recall them with two keystrokes. Five well-written saved replies take half an hour a day off the office, and make the answers consistent — which is a separate win.
The reminders someone keeps in their head. Recurring deadlines, renewals, monthly checks: as long as they live in one person's memory, they are a risk. A shared calendar with recurring events and notifications costs nothing and gets them out of there.
The documents filled in by hand every time. Quotes, order confirmations, engagement letters: usually three fields out of thirty change. A template with variable fields, even in a spreadsheet, removes most of the work and the copying errors with it.
When building really is the answer
There is a fairly clear line. The tools you already own work while the task involves one person and doesn't need to leave a trace. As soon as several people are involved, or you need to know who did what and when, the homemade fixes start to break.
| Situation | What you have is enough | Worth building something |
|---|---|---|
| One person, repetitive task | Yes | |
| Several people on the same data | Yes | |
| You need a history of who did what | Yes | |
| Data has to move between two systems | Yes | |
| Happens three times a month | Yes | |
| Happens twenty times a day | Yes |
The mistake to avoid: automating the mess
If the process changes every week, if everyone does it their own way, if the exceptions outnumber the rule, then it isn't time to automate: it is time to decide how the work gets done.
Automating means fixing a rule in place. With no rule, what you get is a tool nobody uses, because nobody recognises their own work inside it — the same mechanism that leaves new software sitting unused.
The good news is that the week of notes serves this purpose too: while writing down what you do by hand, you notice how often you do it differently.
Try the week of notes and send me the list, however rough. I'll tell you which items I'd remove with tools you already own, which deserve building, and which, honestly, are better left as manual work.
