Back office automation means handing software the steps of an internal process that need no human judgement: copying an order into your CRM, chasing an unpaid invoice, building Monday's report. In a company of 10 to 50 people, a first project runs in weeks and costs a few thousand euros. Whether a process qualifies depends on how many of its steps need a person to decide.
Every step is either a handoff or a decision
Take one internal process and write its steps down in order. Each step is one of two things: information moving from one place to another, or a person making a call.
Handoffs automate well. Pulling an amount out of an email into the tracking sheet, creating the customer record from the website form, raising the invoice from the order line. Software does all of that without picking the wrong row at six on a Friday.
Decisions only automate once you can write them down as a rule. "Chase after 30 days" is a rule. "Chase when the client seems to be dragging" is not, until you say what dragging means in days.
Count the decisions in your process, because that count decides everything that follows. If there are none, nothing is blocking you and you can go straight to a quote. One or two you can write down as a date or a threshold, and it is an ordinary project. If a decision comes back worded differently depending on who you ask, that is the one to write down before you call anyone.
Four processes to start with
Order intake, chasing unpaid invoices, onboarding a new client or a new hire, weekly reporting. In these four, the same piece of data often gets typed in two or three times, by different people.
| Process | The manual step today | What replaces it | What you get back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Order or quote intake | Someone copies the email into the CRM, then into the tracking sheet | Reading the email creates the record and the tracking line in one go | The re-typing time, and the gaps between the two tools |
| Chasing an unpaid invoice | Someone opens the accounts, spots what is late, writes the emails | A date rule fires the reminder with the amount and the reference | The reminders that never went out |
| New client or new hire | A checklist held in someone's head, with things forgotten | A sequence of actions fired by the signature or the start date | Accounts and documents ready on day one |
| Weekly reporting | Two hours of exports and copy-paste on Monday morning | Figures pulled together and sent at a fixed time | Two hours, every week |
Frequency matters more than duration. A ten-minute step done daily costs more over a year than a full day of work done once a quarter. If you recognise one of them, start there.
What it costs and how long it takes
My rates are published on the AI automation page.
A first project starts at €2,380, around four days of work, running in production in three to four weeks. A full project, with your processes mapped and five to ten workflows, starts at €7,140 for about twelve days, and takes six to ten weeks to reach production. Monthly support is available as an option.
Those are my figures rather than a market rate. Use them to check you are in the right order of magnitude before you ask anyone else for a quote: thousands of euros and weeks for a first workflow.
Before pricing anything, check the process deserves a project. The four conditions are set out in my piece on marketing automation, and they hold for any internal process. If the work also touches your website, the ranges are in my article on what it costs to add AI to a website.
How it breaks, and why you hear about it late
An automation depends on tools you do not control, and that is where it stops working.
The other tool changes. Your invoicing software renames a field or restructures its export, and the workflow that read that field finds nothing. Nobody warned you, because on their side it was a routine update.
An unplanned case shows up. Your rule says chase after 30 days, and a client replies to the reminder to dispute the invoice. If nobody decided what happens at that point, the next reminder goes out anyway.
The person who asked for it leaves. The workflow keeps running, but nobody knows what it does or where to change it, so at the next tool migration someone switches it off to be safe.
A stopped workflow shows up fast: invoices stop going out, a client calls. A workflow that keeps running on bad data chases customers who already paid, and you hear about it from them. The second one costs more, because the wrong emails have already gone out.
Two things to put in the quote from the first project: a failure alert sent to a named person, and a written note saying what the workflow does, what it reads and what it writes. Ask for both before you sign.
When a process is not worth automating
Some processes never pay the project back, and you can tell before you start.
If the process changes every couple of months, you will spend more on adjusting the workflow than it saves you.
The volume can also be too low: a ten-minute task that comes up twice a month is four hours a year, and at €595 a day, four days of work will not pay for itself on four hours.
And if two people on the team describe the process differently, write it down and have both of them sign off before you call anyone.
Check the process is well designed too, because once it is automated a bad process produces the same errors, faster and in greater numbers.
Key takeaways
- Break the process into steps and count the decisions. A decision you can write as a date or a threshold is an ordinary project. One that nobody words the same way has to be written down before anything else.
- A first project in a small company runs in days of work and thousands of euros. Mine starts at €2,380 and reaches production in three to four weeks. If a quote runs to several months before the first workflow goes live, ask them to break it up.
- Put two lines in the quote: a failure alert sent to a named person, and a written note of what the workflow does. Without them, you find out it broke from an unhappy customer.
- Do not automate a ten-minute task that comes up twice a month. Four hours a year will not pay for four days of work at €595 a day.
Where to start
If you want to know which of your processes goes first, we can look at it together: AI automation for small businesses. If the real problem is data living in three separate tools, that is what internal tools are for.
