Straight answers about automating a business.

In the UK, automating a single business process costs roughly £1,500 to £6,500, and most SMEs spend £5,000 to £30,000 on their first automation project. Ongoing maintenance runs £500 to £3,000 a month. Cost is driven far more by how many systems have to talk to each other than by how clever the automation is.

Automate the process that is repetitive, rule-based, high in volume, and stable. All four have to be true. The most common good first candidates are invoicing and payment chasing, moving data between systems, and first-response to enquiries — because they happen constantly, follow clear rules, and rarely change.

Record the baseline before anything is built — hours spent, volume handled, error rate — then measure the same things afterwards. Without a before, there is no credible after. Return is the annual value of the time and errors removed, minus the build cost and any ongoing maintenance.

A single, well-scoped business process takes about two weeks from start to running. A connected set of three to six processes takes four to eight weeks. Delays almost never come from the build — they come from access to systems and from nobody internally owning the decisions.

Workflow automation follows fixed rules — if this happens, do that. AI automation handles work that needs judgement or language, such as reading an unstructured email or classifying a request. Most business automation is workflow automation, and using AI where a rule would do makes the system more expensive, slower and less predictable.

Yes — raising, sending, chasing and reconciling invoices can all be automated, and together they are one of the most common first automations. The part that usually stays manual is deciding when to escalate a genuinely overdue account, because that is a commercial relationship decision rather than a rule.