New Business Tools

The automations worth setting up first

14 August 2025 · 5 min read

Automation has never been more accessible. Tools that connect your apps together can move information around without anyone touching it. The risk is not that you cannot automate enough, it is that you automate the wrong things and add fragile complexity for little gain, then spend more time maintaining the automation than it ever saved.

The three-part test

A task is a good candidate when it is repetitive, rule-based and frequent. Repetitive means it happens the same way each time. Rule-based means the decisions can be written down as clear if-this-then-that logic. Frequent means it happens often enough that the time saved is real. Tasks that fail any of the three are usually better left to a person, at least for now.

Good first candidates

Moving new enquiries into your CRM, sending a consistent welcome sequence, chasing unpaid invoices, scheduling and reminding for meetings, and backing up important files are classic starting points. They are dull, they are rule-based, and they are exactly the sort of thing that quietly slips when a business is busy, which is when they matter most.

Automate the process, not the mess

Automating a broken process just makes the mess happen faster. Tidy and document the steps by hand first, until they are genuinely repeatable, then automate the version that works. It is also wise to build in a way to see when an automation fails, because a silent break that stops chasing invoices for a month is worse than no automation at all.

Automate the boring and predictable, keep judgement in human hands, document what you have built, and check now and then that it is still doing what you think it is.