Is your team big enough for an audit to pay for itself

Not every company should buy this. The arithmetic is simple enough to do before you speak to anybody, and it is better for both sides if you do.

The arithmetic

An audit has to find several times its own fee in annual automatable cost, and the automation work has to be worth commissioning on top of that. Both depend on the same thing: how many hours of repetitive administrative work exist across the team.

Repetitive work does not scale evenly with headcount. It concentrates in the roles that sit between systems and between people: operations, finance, support, scheduling, sales administration. A twelve-person company where eight people are on the shop floor and one person does all the coordination has one person's worth of automatable work. A twelve-person company where six people move information between tools all day has considerably more.

So the useful question is not how many employees you have. It is how many of them spend a serious part of the week retyping things, chasing things, and moving things between systems.

What makes a company a good fit

• Ten to fifty people, with a real back office rather than one person doing everything.
• Software with somewhere to plug in. The tools do not need to be sophisticated. They need somewhere for data to go in and come out.
• Work that crosses people. Handoffs hold the largest and least visible costs, and they only appear once you interview more than one person.
• An owner who wants a decision. The output is a priced list, and a priced list is only useful to somebody who intends to act on part of it.

What makes it a poor fit

• Fewer than about ten people. There usually is not enough repetitive administration to pay for both the audit and the build, and the owner already knows where the time goes, because they are doing most of it.
• Almost entirely physical work. Trades, delivery, production. There is nearly always some administrative overhead worth attacking, but it may not add up to a project.
• Every process living inside one system that already does the job. If the work sits in a single platform that can automate it, the answer is to use more of that platform, and we will say so.
• Looking for headcount reduction. The interviews run on the premise that we are finding the boring parts of people's jobs in order to remove them. That framing is what produces honest answers. If the intent is to identify people to cut, employees will work it out by the third interview and the data will be worthless. Worth being straight about before anything starts.

The cheapest way to find out

Pick the two people in your company who most often say some version of "I spend my whole morning on this". Ask each of them to walk you through yesterday, in order, from the first thing they touched. Do not ask what is repetitive. Ask what happened.

If you get twenty minutes of specifics and at least two things that made you wince, an audit will find considerably more, because it does that with everybody and then joins the answers together.

If you get five minutes and nothing surprising, save your money.