Find out what your admin is really costing you
The Admin Automation Audit is a fixed-price review of how your team handles repetitive office work, for businesses in Telford, Shrewsbury and across Shropshire. It shows you where the hours and errors go, and what is worth automating first.
Book a free 20-minute callFixed fee, usually two to three weeks, credited if you build, no obligation. And an honest view of what not to change.
Is this for you?
It fits when admin is eating time that should go on the work you're best at, and some of this sounds familiar:
- Someone copies the same information from emails, forms or job sheets into another system (duplicate entry).
- Spreadsheets have become the real system, and only one person fully understands them (one-person bottleneck).
- Invoicing, ordering or reporting keeps slipping because it depends on manual steps.
- Mistakes get caught late, by a customer or at month end (errors surfacing late).
- You are thinking of hiring more admin staff to keep up.
From kick-off to report
- Step1
Kick-off call (1 hour)
We agree which parts of the business to look at, up to three core processes.
- Step2
Time with your team
I talk to the people who do the work and watch how it is actually done, not just how it is meant to be done.
- Step3
Mapping and costing
Each process is mapped step by step, with the time spent, the error points and the cost to the business.
- Step4
Report and walkthrough
You get a written report and a call to go through it, including an honest view of what not to change.
The audit is one step of the full process.
What the audit gets you
- A clear map of how each process works today, and where time and accuracy are lost.
- An estimate of the yearly cost of doing things by hand.
- A prioritised list of improvements, with rough costs and expected savings.
- A recommendation for each: off-the-shelf tool, small integration, or custom system.
- A suggested order to do things in, so the quickest wins come first.
The report is yours to keep. You can use it with me, with another developer, or on your own.
What the numbers can look like
An illustrative example for a small services business with a three-person office team. Worth seeing before you hire another person to keep up. Try it with your own numbers on the cost calculator.
| Manual task | Hours a week | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|
| Re-keying job sheets into the invoicing system | 18 | £14,904 |
| Copying orders from email into the stock spreadsheet | 12 | £9,936 |
| Checking and fixing data entry mistakes | 6 | £4,968 |
| Building the monthly report by hand | 2.5 | £2,070 |
| Total | 38.5 | £31,878 |
Based on 46 working weeks at £18 an hour fully loaded staff cost. It does not include the cost of errors that reach customers. Your audit uses your real figures.
Price
- Covers up to three processes, usually delivered within two to three weeks of the kick-off meeting.
- If you go ahead with a build within 90 days, the full fee is credited against it.
- No obligation to build anything afterwards.
Curious what a build looks like? Read how a fleet tyre service replaced paper worksheets and one person's memory.
Why I don't start with a brief
A high-voltage speciality cable manufacturer had a bottleneck. Every quote had to pass through the one engineer who understood the maths behind a cable's construction, and it took about a week to get a quote out of the door. I was brought in to finish the back end of a system meant to fix that, working to a brief signed off two years earlier by people who had since left the company.
Two months in, while testing the calculations, I built a small tool so the engineer could check the maths on one screen. It took an afternoon. He told me it was the most useful thing anyone had built for them.
That afternoon's work was closer to what the business needed than the system I had been hired to finish. With something like it, sales staff could have configured a cable with a customer on the phone in fifteen minutes, without the engineer in the middle. The project had been specified, approved and half-built without anyone testing the brief against how the work was actually done.
That is why the audit comes first, and why it starts with watching the work rather than reading a specification. It is also why I will tell you when the answer is smaller than you expected.
Who does the work
I'm Barnabas Kecskes, a senior software developer. I've spent 15 years building in-house administrative systems for businesses, and you deal with me from the first call to the final report. See case studies.
The audit exists to decide whether a system is worth building at all. It puts a yearly cost on the manual work, so you can see what a build would have to beat. Sometimes the answer is no. When it is yes, the system takes pressure off the people doing the work, cuts out the errors that come from a process nobody wrote down, and lets the business grow without a scramble to hire every time volume goes up.
Common questions
How long does an audit take?
Usually two to three weeks from the kick-off meeting, with one or two days of that on site. Larger businesses with several departments take longer.
What does it cost?
£2,450 plus VAT, fixed. It covers up to three processes. If you go ahead with a build within 90 days, the full fee is credited against it.
What do you need from us?
Time with the people who do the work, and a look at the spreadsheets, systems and paperwork they use. There is nothing to prepare beforehand.
What if the answer is "don't build anything"?
Then that is what the report says, with the reasons. You still have the map of where time and errors go and what each costs. Sometimes the answer is a setting in software you already own.
Can I use the report without you?
Yes. The report is yours to keep, to use with another developer, or on your own.
Start with a 20-minute call
Tell me which task eats the most time, and I will tell you honestly whether an audit is worth it.
Book a callI take on one or two new clients a month.