Business Process Automation Services
It is the last Friday of the month. Someone is rekeying figures into a third system, someone else is chasing an approval for the third time, and a report that used to be automatic is being rebuilt by hand because the person who built it left.
Our Business Process Automation Services start by mapping how your processes actually work, including undocumented steps. We identify what is worth automating, what should stay human, and what needs fixing first. If a process is not ready, we will tell you rather than automate a broken workflow.
Our Business Process Automation Services start by mapping how your processes actually work, including undocumented steps. We identify what is worth automating, what should stay human, and what needs fixing first. If a process is not ready, we will tell you rather than automate a broken workflow.
Business process automation is the use of software to run a repeatable business process end to end collecting the information, applying the rules, updating the systems and escalating the exceptions so that a person only handles what genuinely needs judgement.
It covers invoice and purchase-ledger work, approvals, recurring reports, onboarding and the data that gets typed into two systems that do not talk. Done properly it starts with the process, not the software. Most of what a review turns up is not an automation problem at all.
Before A Single Rule Gets Written
Why not just buy business automation software?
Automating a process can cost twenty pounds a month or several thousand pounds once. Which one suits you turns on a question most suppliers never ask.
Buy Automation Software Off The Shelf
Dext lifts figures off receipts. Zapier shuttles records between apps that already speak to each other. Xero nudges customers who have not paid. Twenty to fifty pounds a month, running before lunch.
Plenty of firms need nothing beyond that, and if yours is one of them we would rather lose the sale than take it. Ring us and you will leave with a product name instead of a proposal.
Where it stops is the join. No subscription knows your job numbers sit in one system and your purchase orders in another, or that anything above two thousand pounds waits on a director.
Plenty of firms need nothing beyond that, and if yours is one of them we would rather lose the sale than take it. Ring us and you will leave with a product name instead of a proposal.
Where it stops is the join. No subscription knows your job numbers sit in one system and your purchase orders in another, or that anything above two thousand pounds waits on a director.
The Week Before We Build
What Gets Built From That
Which business processes are worth automating?
Most processes fall into four groups. Only two of them should be automated.
01
Automate end to end
High-volume repetitive tasks with stable rules are ideal for improving productivity through automation. Reading supplier invoices into the purchase ledger, timestamping an off-hire, or pulling the same figures into a weekly report can all run in the background unless something goes wrong.
02
Automate, with a checkpoint
Same volume, same rules, but a wrong output costs real money – a payment run, a quote, a credit note. The automation does the work and a person approves it before it leaves. Slower than full automation, and the right trade for anything with a number on it.
03
Fix the process first
Two people run it differently, the rules live in someone’s head, or every third case is an exception. Automating this manual tasks makes a broken process fail faster and more confidently. This is the most common finding in week one and it is the cheapest thing we ever tell anyone.
04
Leave it alone
Rare, or genuinely a judgement call. A handful of times a year is not worth a build, and anything that needs someone to weigh up a relationship should stay with the person who has it. Automating the interesting rare thing instead of the boring frequent one is the classic mistake.
The Office for National Statistics published its latest read on AI in UK businesses on 20 July 2026, drawing on the Business Insights and Conditions Survey. Adoption has almost tripled since late 2023, but it calls that adoption “relatively shallow”, with the average adopting business using only around 1.6 AI technologies, up from 1.4. Most firms have bought one tool and stopped.
What business process automation won’t do
Most vendors skip this section. It is the one worth reading.
It won’t make a commercial judgement we haven’t agreed
If an invoice, a quote or an approval falls outside the rules we mapped, it stops and asks. Task automation does not improvise its way to a number. That means occasional hold-ups you would rather it had absorbed, and on anything financial that is the correct direction to fail in.
It won’t be faster than your slowest approver
Process automation solutions removes the typing, not the waiting. If a purchase order sits for four days because one director checks email on Sundays, you will have a very fast process that still takes four days. We will tell you that before you pay for a build, not after.
It won’t handle the exception that has never happened
It works from the cases we found in your history. The genuinely novel one the supplier who invoices in a different currency for the first time, the customer who asks for something nobody has asked for gets flagged to a person. That is the design, not a gap in it.
It won’t fix a process two people run differently
If the rules live in someone’s head and the written version is out of date, automation makes that visible in week one. More than one client has found the review worth more than the build. We would rather tell you that in week one than in month three.
Automation that quietly does the wrong thing to an invoice is worse than no automation at all. A missed call you find out about. A payment run that has been silently miscoding one supplier for four months, you find out about at year end.
How BPA setup works
Week one – sitting with the work
We shadow the process end to end and write down what really happens, not what the procedure says. The surprise is usually scale: fewer cases than you assumed, and far more exceptions.
Week two – wiring it together
The logic gets written and joined to whatever you already run accounts package, job software, shared drives. Then we replay last quarter’s difficult cases through it while nothing is live and nobody is affected.
Week three – running under supervision
Automation solution starts on a narrow slice of real work with a person checking every output. No wholesale handover on day one. A fortnight of watching turns up what the shadowing missed, and that gets corrected before volume rises.
Weeks four to eight – tightening it against reality
This stretch decides whether people trust the thing or quietly work around it. We sit with the messy ones, the account that gets billed two ways, the job nobody can categorise, the request that always arrives half-complete.
Checkpoints move. Some fire so rarely they come out; others get added where a near miss showed one was needed. Almost all of the distance between a process that runs itself and one that generates its own admin is closed here, long after go-live.
Checkpoints move. Some fire so rarely they come out; others get added where a near miss showed one was needed. Almost all of the distance between a process that runs itself and one that generates its own admin is closed here, long after go-live.
After that, a monthly look at what ran clean, what stopped for a human, and what it got wrong. Processes drift as businesses change, and rules written in March rarely still fit in October.
The processes we automate most
Nine workflow automations we are asked for repeatedly. The shape is familiar; the rules underneath never are.
Invoices and PO
Twenty minutes a day typing numbers that already exist somewhere else.
Quotes and Estimates
The quote you send on Thursday loses to the one that arrived on Tuesday.
Approvals and Sign-Off
Nothing waits for a good reason. It waits because nobody was asked twice.
Client Onboarding
New clients judge you on the first fortnight, and most of it is same paperwork
Recurring Reports
The same numbers, the same layout, the same Monday morning, forever.
Data Between Systems
One person exists to keep two databases agreeing with each other.
Compliance and Renewals
Certificates expire quietly and are noticed loudly, usually by somebody else.
Email and Enquiry Triage
Most of the inbox is the same handful of questions, answered slightly differently each time.
Scheduling and Dispatch
The schedule is correct at eight in the morning and wrong by half past nine.
Frequently asked questions
What is business process automation?
In practice it means a job that currently moves through three people and two spreadsheets moves through one system instead, with a person involved only where a decision is needed. It suits work that repeats often and follows rules you could write down.
What does business process automation cost in the UK?
A first build runs £1,500 to £5,000 plus VAT and takes one to three weeks, then optional monthly fee to run and maintain it. What moves you within that range is how many systems are involved and whether anyone has written the rules down.
Is this consulting or a build?
Both, and in that order. The mapping week is part of the build fee, not a separate invoice. If you have an in-house team who will do the implementation themselves, a pure consultancy will serve you better and we will point you at one.
Can you work with the systems we already have?
Usually. Anything with an API is straightforward; older software often needs a workaround rather than a connection, and occasionally the honest answer is that the join is not worth building. We check this in week one, before you have committed to anything.
How long before it is running?
Three weeks to a first live process, then four to eight weeks tuning it against real cases. We will not promise faster. Anything live inside a fortnight has skipped the part where we work out how the job really runs, and that is the part worth paying for.
Who owns it if we stop working together?
You do. It runs on your accounts, your subscriptions and your data, and we hand over the documentation. Some builds are simple enough for your own team to maintain, and if yours is one of them we would rather tell you than sell you a retainer.