15 business processes worth automating today

Business process automation does not mean replacing people with robots. In small and mid-sized companies it almost always comes down to the same few things: someone copies data from one place to another, someone searches for information that already exists somewhere, and someone answers questions they have already answered a hundred times.

Below are 15 processes that are good candidates for automation, grouped by department. For each one we describe briefly what it looks like done by hand, what can be automated and how much effort it roughly takes. Not all of them need AI — for some we say plainly that a spreadsheet, Make or a feature of a system you already own will do.

How to read the effort rating: low = rules, Make or configuring an existing system; days to a few weeks, hundreds to low thousands of euros. Medium = AI with human review, connected to one or two systems; a pilot typically costs €3,500–7,000. High = a custom model or several systems at once, from around €12,000. All figures are indicative and exclude VAT.

Sales

1. Retyping emailed orders into the ERP

By hand: someone opens the email and the PDF or spreadsheet attached to it, and keys the order into the system line by line.
What can be automated: reading the email and the attachment, matching items to your catalogue, checking stock and creating the order; unclear cases go to a person for approval. More on our order automation page.
Effort: medium. With a few customers on a fixed format, low — rules will do.

2. Preparing price quotes

By hand: a salesperson digs through the price list, old quotes and a discount spreadsheet to put together a quote that should take ten minutes, not an hour.
What can be automated: turning a customer enquiry into a draft quote with items, prices and discounts applied by your rules; the salesperson checks it and sends it. See quote automation.
Effort: medium, higher for complex product configurations.

3. Chasing unanswered quotes

By hand: the salesperson keeps track, in a calendar or in their head, of who needs a call after a week.
What can be automated: a reminder or a ready-to-send email when a quote has had no response by a set date.
Effort: low. No AI needed — your CRM or a simple Make scenario handles it.

Purchasing and warehouse

Purchasing and warehouse: delivery notes matched to goods receipts without retyping

4. Delivery notes and goods receipts

By hand: a warehouse worker or buyer copies a paper or PDF delivery note into a goods receipt and checks it against the purchase order.
What can be automated: extracting items and quantities from the document, comparing them with the order and flagging any differences. See document data extraction.
Effort: medium.

5. Checking supplier confirmations

By hand: a buyer opens each order confirmation to see whether the supplier has changed the price, quantity or delivery date.
What can be automated: comparing the confirmation with your purchase order and raising an alert only when something differs. Technically it is the same principle as delivery notes.
Effort: low to medium, depending on how many formats the confirmations come in.

6. Keeping stock in sync across the shop, ERP and spreadsheets

By hand: someone exports stock levels from one system every morning and uploads them to another — or it gets settled by a “do we still have any?” phone call.
What can be automated: scheduled synchronisation between systems, with an alert when they disagree. See system integration.
Effort: low to medium — usually no AI involved; what matters is whether your systems have an API.

Accounting

7. Supplier invoices

By hand: an accountant copies the supplier, company ID, amounts and VAT from a PDF or scan into the accounting software.
What can be automated: extracting invoice data without templates, checking totals, matching to the purchase order and posting to the system; uncertain documents go for review. See automated invoice processing.
Effort: medium. With a few suppliers on the same template, OCR is enough.

8. Payment matching and reminders

By hand: an accountant compares the bank statement with open invoices and writes payment reminders.
What can be automated: automatic matching by payment reference and a reminder sent once the invoice is overdue.
Effort: low. Most accounting software and banks already do this — often you just need to switch it on.

9. Receipts and travel expenses

By hand: staff hand in crumpled receipts and someone types them up at the end of the month.
What can be automated: snapping the receipt on a phone, extracting the amount, date and merchant, and adding it to the expense report.
Effort: low to medium — for a small team an off-the-shelf app pays off better than anything bespoke.

Customer service

10. Repeat customer questions

By hand: an agent answers “where is my order?”, “how do I return this?” or “is it in stock?” dozens of times a day.
What can be automated: sorting the questions, pulling the order status from your system and drafting a reply from approved sources; the agent sends it, edits it or bins it. See customer support automation.
Effort: medium.

11. The shared info@ or sales@ inbox

By hand: one person reads everything that came in each morning and hands it out to colleagues — or nobody does, and emails sit there.
What can be automated: sorting emails by content, routing them to the right person, extracting the key details and drafting a reply. See email automation.
Effort: low to medium. If sorting by sender and subject is enough, mail rules will do it.

Management and reporting

12. The weekly or monthly report

By hand: every Friday someone exports data from the ERP, the shop and a few spreadsheets, stitches it together and sends it to management.
What can be automated: merging data from several systems, calculating the KPIs, adding a short note on what changed, and sending it on Monday morning. See reporting automation.
Effort: low to medium. If it is always the same tables, Power Query or a dashboard tool is enough.

13. Finding things in contracts, policies and price lists

By hand: “What is the notice period with supplier X?” — followed by half an hour on the shared drive, or a call to the one colleague who knows.
What can be automated: answering a question asked in plain language, with a link to the exact document and passage, while respecting access rights. See company document search.
Effort: medium.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing: a camera on the line flags the defective part

14. Visual quality inspection

By hand: an inspector at the end of the line looks at every part and, when tired or when the line runs fast, misses a defect.
What can be automated: a camera and a model trained on your parts that rejects or flags defective pieces; the data can stay on the shop floor. See AI visual quality inspection.
Effort: high — images need to be collected and labelled, and the model measured against your inspectors.

15. Paper production reports and shift logs

By hand: the shift supervisor fills in a paper form at the end of the shift and the office types it into the system the next day.
What can be automated: extracting data from a photo of the form, including handwritten numbers, checking the values and entering them into the system. It is the same solution as document data extraction.
Effort: medium. In the long run, replacing the paper with a tablet form is often cheaper.

Business process automation at a glance

#	Process	Department	Effort	Needs AI?
1	Emailed orders	sales	medium	yes, with varied formats
2	Price quotes	sales	medium	yes
3	Chasing quotes	sales	low	no
4	Delivery notes and receipts	purchasing and warehouse	medium	yes
5	Supplier confirmations	purchasing and warehouse	low – medium	depends on formats
6	Stock sync	purchasing and warehouse	low – medium	mostly no
7	Supplier invoices	accounting	medium	yes, with many suppliers
8	Payment matching	accounting	low	no
9	Receipts and expenses	accounting	low – medium	off-the-shelf app
10	Repeat customer questions	customer service	medium	yes
11	Shared inbox	customer service	low – medium	depends on content
12	Weekly report	management	low – medium	for the commentary, yes
13	Document search	management	medium	yes
14	Visual quality inspection	manufacturing	high	yes, custom model
15	Production reports	manufacturing	medium	yes

If you are not sure which of these to tackle first, the method in what to automate first in your company will help. All our solutions are in one place on the solutions page. And if you already have an AI pilot that works in a demo but not in day-to-day operations, see taking an AI prototype to production.

3 processes not worth automating

Not everything that can be automated should be. Leave these three to people — at least for now:

Decisions about people. Screening candidates, staff appraisals, bonuses. A mistake here hurts far more than the time saved, and under the EU AI Act these are high-risk uses with strict obligations. AI can help prepare the groundwork; a person should decide.
Rare tasks. Year-end closing, a once-a-year price list change, a one-off migration. The automation will not pay back, and by the time you need it again something will have changed.
Processes that need simplifying first. If nobody reads the report, or two people do the same check because nobody knows who owns it, automation just preserves the problem. Cut the unnecessary step instead — it costs nothing.

Before any AI process automation, count the hours as well. At low volumes the monthly running costs eat the whole saving, and a spreadsheet or Make will serve you better. We go into this in how much an AI solution costs.

What could be automated in your company? Tell us what you do by hand today — you do not need to know whether you need an AI agent, automation or a system integration. We are happy to go through it with you.