5 small business tasks you can automate this month
Five repetitive jobs almost every small business does by hand, what automating each one looks like, and what it takes to set up.
Automation sounds like something for big companies with IT departments. In practice, the best first automations are small, boring and specific. Here are five that pay off quickly for almost any small business.
1. New enquiries into one list
Enquiries arrive by web form, email, phone message and social media. Someone copies them into a notebook or spreadsheet, sometimes.
Automated: every form submission and enquiry email lands as a new row in one sheet or simple CRM, with the date, source and contact details filled in. You get a short alert so nothing sits unanswered.
Setup effort: low. This is usually the first thing we suggest.
2. Follow-up reminders
Quotes go out and nobody chases them. Most lost jobs are not lost to a competitor; they are lost to silence. (If you are buying the automation itself, our guide to fixed quotes versus hourly helps you compare offers.)
Automated: when a quote is sent, a reminder is scheduled for three days later. If the client has not replied, you get a nudge, or a polite follow-up goes out on its own.
Setup effort: low to medium, depending on where your quotes live.
3. Invoices and payment chasing
Creating invoices by hand from job notes, then remembering who has paid, is a monthly headache.
Automated: when a job is marked done, an invoice is created from it. Unpaid invoices trigger friendly reminders at set intervals, and you see one list of who owes what.
Setup effort: medium. Worth it once you send more than a handful of invoices a month.
4. The weekly numbers
Every Monday someone pulls numbers from three places to see how last week went. Or nobody does.
Automated: a short report arrives in your inbox every Monday morning: jobs done, money in, money owed, enquiries received. Same format every week, so changes jump out.
Setup effort: medium. The hard part is deciding which five numbers matter. If those numbers live in a shared sheet that keeps breaking, see spreadsheet or internal tool.
5. Document data into your system
Supplier invoices, order forms and statements arrive as PDFs and get typed into a spreadsheet or accounting software.
Automated: documents dropped into a folder or forwarded to an address are read, and the key fields land where they belong. A person checks anything the tool is unsure about.
Setup effort: medium. See our post on bank statement PDFs for how this works.
How to choose your first one
Pick the task that is done most often, follows the same steps every time, and hurts when it is forgotten. Automate that one well, live with it for two weeks, then do the next. Trying to automate everything at once is how automation projects stall.
Tell us which task eats most of your week and we will send back a short written plan for automating it, free.