Automation

What to automate first in a small business, and how to tell if it is worth it

The best first automation is rarely the most impressive one. It is a job that happens often, follows the same rules every time, and moves information from one system to another by hand.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 29 October 20263 minute read4 sources

Four signs of a good first candidate

Look for a job with all four:

1It happens often: daily or weekly, not once a quarter.
2It follows the same rules every time, so you could write them on one page.
3Somebody copies information from one system into another to do it: an enquiry into the CRM, an invoice into the accounts, a booking into a calendar.
4A mistake in it costs something: a lead that is never answered, an invoice sent twice, a booking that is lost.

Cost it from your own figures

Time the job once, with a stopwatch, and count how often it is done in a normal week. Minutes each time, times the times a week, times your working weeks, is the hours it costs you a year; times what an hour of that person's time costs is the money.

The free automation savings calculator does that sum, takes off the monthly charge of the tool the automation would run on, and shows how long a fixed-price build would take to pay for itself. It reports hours and euro from your figures and makes no assumption of its own about how much you would save.

Count what the hours do not show

The calculator counts time. A lead answered the same hour instead of the next morning, or an invoice that is never keyed twice, is worth something too, and it is not in the figure. Decide whether it matters before you decide the job is not worth doing.

Check what it does with personal data

An automation that uses personal data is a use of personal data like any other. It needs a lawful reason, a line in your record of processing, and the same security as the systems it connects, all before it runs. What has to be written down first goes through the list.

Two uses need more. If the automation joins data from separate systems to build a picture of individual customers, or tracks what individuals do, it may be on the Data Protection Commission's list of uses that need an impact assessment: the free DPIA check tells you. And if it makes a decision about a person on its own, with legal or similarly significant effects, Article 22 of the GDPR applies.

Choose the tool last

Zapier, Make, n8n and Power Automate all connect the common business apps, and they differ mostly in what they charge for: Zapier per action, n8n per run, Power Automate per user. The four compared from their own price lists shows how the same workflow costs different amounts in each.

Where the systems you use already have a direct connection between them, such as a bank feed into your accounts, use it first: it is one less thing to keep running. Connecting Revolut Business to your accounts is an example.

What makes one last

An automation that works on the day it is built is half the job. The other half:

1One system is named as the master copy of each piece of data, so the automation never decides between two versions.
2Every failure retries, and then tells a named person, by a route they will see.
3What it does is written down where the next person can find it: what triggers it, what it changes, and how to switch it off.
4Somebody looks at it every month, and it is changed when the systems around it change.

Sources

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What does the task cost you a year?

Minutes each time and times a week in; the hours and money it costs a year, the saving after tool costs, and the payback on a fixed-price build, out.

Run the free check

The first automation, built to last

Build writes down the systems, the records and the master copy of each piece of data before anything is built, then joins the systems and automates the jobs that repeat, with every failure retried and sent to a person. €1,500 for one connection, €3,000 for up to five workflows.

See Build

Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

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