What does automation cost for an SME?

Why a smaller company gets no price list

There is no rate card on this site. Automation is not a product with fixed contents, and two companies asking for the same thing on paper rarely want the same thing in practice. One wants its quoting flow to move faster and needs three existing systems to start talking to each other. The other wants that same quoting flow to move faster, keeps everything in one package already, and mostly has a problem with who approves what.

A figure fixed in advance would be too low in the first case and too high in the second. What we can do is explain what a quote is built on, which choices make it heavier or lighter, and what you see before you sign.

What the quote is based on

We quote on the scope of one process, not on the size of your payroll. Process is meant literally here: the route one document or one request travels from arrival to completion. The supplier invoice that has to get from the mailbox to the accounts. The request that has to get from a first phone call to a signed quote. As long as that route has not been described, nobody can honestly put a figure on it.

Four things decide whether such a scope turns out heavy or light.

How many steps actually get taken over. A process with four decision points is more work than one with a single decision point. It often turns out during the conversation that two of those four grew historically and nobody remembers why they exist. That is a gain for the scope, and it costs you nothing.

The state of the data going in weighs just as much. Clean records in an existing package are something entirely different from twenty years of loose files on a network drive. That difference shows up in the quote: if there is cleaning up to do first, it goes in as its own line and you decide whether we do it together or your own people pick it up.

How many systems have to come along. Every connection to an existing accounting, quoting or planning package is a piece of work in itself. Some of those packages are easy to talk to. Others are not, and then the detour costs more than the straight road. Which of the two we are dealing with is usually clear halfway through a conversation.

Finally there is who has to approve the result. We do not build a process nobody looks at any more. The number of check points and where they sit belong to the scope, because they shape what has to be built.

Fixed scope, not a cost per user

Most software packages charge per user. That model has one unpleasant consequence: it penalises you when it works. Add five colleagues after a successful project and the invoice goes up, while the actual effort has already been made. So we charge on the scope we agree together. If your team grows, nothing changes about what you pay us for that process.

It also means we do not cover ourselves with an open-ended arrangement. Additional work exists, and it happens that a client spots something during the project that was not in there at the start. We write a separate line for it and you decide again. What was agreed stays at the price that was agreed.

How the first conversation goes

It starts with a short conversation in which we mostly listen. Which step in your business eats the most attention from people who should be doing something else? Where does work pile up because one person is away? Where does the same piece of data get typed in three times?

An owner often knows the answer straight away. Sometimes it only surfaces once we walk the process step by step and ask what happens when a step goes wrong. That walk-through is not a sales pitch. It is the only moment at which we learn enough to dare put a quote together.

After that we go deeper into the processes, which can also be done remotely. We note what comes in, what goes out, who intervenes and which systems are involved. The scope comes out of those notes, and the quote comes out of the scope.

What you see up front, before you sign

You never get a figure without a description. The quote states which process we take on, which steps get taken over, which steps stay with a person, and which existing systems we connect to. Example screens show, in simplified form, what such a screen would look like. They are there to make the conversation concrete, not to suggest the product is already finished.

You also see what is not in there. That matters just as much. Most disappointments in this trade come not from what was built but from what somebody assumed was included.

What if it does not fit

Sometimes the answer is that automation is not the next thing here. A process that runs twice a month and barely takes any time is not a candidate. Nor is a process whose rules change every month because the market has not settled. We will say so, even though it earns us nothing.

We have nothing to gain from starting a project you would regret within the year. What we build is only worth something at a client who stays. A badly chosen first process is the fastest way to lose that.

So when does it fit? When the same action repeats every week, when the data already exists and is simply sitting in the wrong place, and when you can point at who does that step today. If you recognise that, the conversation is worth having.