Most small businesses type the same information four or five times per job. Once into the enquiry form, once into a quote, once into the calendar, once into the invoice, once into a spreadsheet nobody reads. Nobody planned that. It accumulated.
How to find yours in one day
For one day, note every time you retype something that already exists somewhere else. Don’t change how you work — just note it.
Almost everyone finds the same three:
- Enquiry → quote. Name, address, and job details, retyped.
- Quote → job → invoice. The same figures, moved by hand.
- Anything → spreadsheet. Usually maintained by whoever is most conscientious, and usually out of date anyway.
Add up the minutes. Five hours a week is the number I land on most often. At any sensible hourly rate, that’s a part-time salary spent on retyping.
What is genuinely worth automating
Worth it: anything where the same data moves between two systems on a fixed rule. Enquiry into your job system. Quote into invoice. Job complete into a review request. These are boring, repetitive, and they never need judgement — which is exactly what makes them safe to automate.
Worth it: anything that gets forgotten. Follow-ups especially. A quote that nobody chased is a job you paid to win and then dropped.
Not worth it: anything requiring a decision. Pricing a difficult job. Deciding whether a customer is worth keeping. Automating judgement produces confident nonsense, and then you spend longer checking it than doing it.
Not worth it: something that happens twice a year. Do it by hand. The automation will break between uses and you’ll have forgotten how it worked.
The honest catch
Automation multiplies whatever process you already have. If your process is muddled, you get muddle faster and in more places. Sorting out the process first is usually the bigger win, and it’s free.
The thing worth doing
Pick the single most annoying retype in your week. Just one. Time how long it takes, then multiply by how often it happens in a year.
If that number is embarrassing, you’ve found where to start. If it isn’t, you’ve learned something useful too — most people guess wrong about which task is actually costing them.
One thing I shipped this month
A motor repair shop was writing job details on paper, then retyping them into a spreadsheet each evening, then again onto an invoice. Now the details are entered once, on a phone, at the machine — and the paperwork and the invoice generate from that. Their evening admin went away entirely, and the data stopped disappearing when a sheet got oily and unreadable.
Next month: what actually belongs on a homepage, and the six things that don’t.