Questions

What can a small business automate?

A small business can automate any task that repeats the same way every time and moves data between two systems. In practice that means: pushing orders to the courier, issuing and booking invoices, daily reports, answering routine enquiries, and customer reminders.

The most commonly automated tasks:

1. Order → shipping label. Saves 2–4 minutes per order — around 50 hours a month at 900 orders.
2. Invoice → accounting system. Saves 4–6 minutes per invoice.
3. The daily report. Saves 20–60 minutes a day.
4. Answering enquiries. Doesn't save many hours — it stops customers leaking away instead.
5. Chasing payments and returns.

What isn't worth automating: tasks that happen a handful of times a month; processes that keep changing shape; judgement calls whose context lives in someone's head.

The rule of thumb is blunt: if a task takes under 5 hours a month, automating it almost never pays.

How much does business process automation cost?

In Bulgaria, automating one process costs between €1,500 and €8,000 one-off, plus €200–€900 a month in support. A single well-defined process — pushing orders to a courier, say — runs about €2,500 and takes two weeks.

Add hosting and third-party services on top — typically €20–€80 a month.

Two kinds of quote deserve suspicion: the one with no fixed price (you're underwriting the supplier's uncertainty) and the one with no ongoing support (the automation will stop one day, and nobody will know).

Funding: Bulgaria's “Digitalisation of Enterprises” programme covers up to 70% of the investment for eligible companies.

When does automation pay for itself?

Automation pays for itself when the time it saves is worth more than the project cost. The arithmetic:

project price ÷ (hours saved per month × hourly cost) = months to payback

Worked example: 900 orders a month × 4 minutes = 60 hours. At €9/hour, €540 a month. A €2,500 project is paid off in about 4.6 months.

When it doesn't pay:

• Manual work under ~15 hours a month in total
• A task under 5 hours a month
• A process that changes more often than it repeats

A sensible ceiling: if payback comes out past 9 months, walk away. Not because the sums are wrong — because nine months from now your business will have changed enough to make the solution the wrong one.

And keep an eye on the second number: errors. One wrong shipping label costs a return, a reshipment, and sometimes the customer. It rarely makes it into the calculation — and it's often the bigger line.

Run your own numbers

Can spreadsheet processes be automated?

Yes — and in most cases the spreadsheet gets to stay. The problem is rarely Excel itself; the problem is the human filling it in by hand.

Three options, cheapest first:

1. The spreadsheet stays and fills itself. Data flows in automatically from the shop, the accounts, the courier. The file, the formulas and the team's habits are left alone. Fastest and cheapest — usually €1,500–€2,500.
2. The spreadsheet becomes an automatic report. It arrives by email every morning. Nobody opens a file again.
3. The spreadsheet becomes a system. Only when several people write to one file at once, when history matters, or when the file quietly turned into a database in a spreadsheet costume.

When a spreadsheet is a genuine risk: when exactly one person knows how it works. That's not a technical problem — it's an operational one, and it's the single most common reason people ring us.

Is company data safe when you use AI?

That depends entirely on how it's built. Your data is safe when the supplier runs on a business agreement with the language model (your data never trains it), processes only what the task strictly needs, and has signed a data processing agreement with you.

Five questions for any supplier, before anything is signed:

1. Does my information train the model? The answer must be no — in the contract, not in an email.
2. Where is the data processed? EU or US, and on what legal basis.
3. What exactly leaves my system? The whole invoice, or just the fields the task needs?
4. Is there a signed DPA? A supplier who doesn't know the acronym has answered your question.
5. What happens in a breach? Who notifies whom, and how fast.

A practical rule: your customers' personal data — names, addresses, phone numbers — shouldn't pass through a language model unless the task genuinely demands it. Most tasks don't: a shipping label needs an ordinary integration, not AI.

From August 2026, the EU AI Act requires telling people when they're talking to an AI rather than a person. If your supplier hasn't heard of it, find another supplier.

Which processes should NOT be automated?

Don't automate a process that isn't stable, doesn't repeat, or is broken at its core. Automation makes a process faster — including when the process is wrong.

The only honest question: if this process stopped dead tomorrow, what exactly would break? If the answer is “nothing” — don't automate it. Retire it.

Didn’t find your question?

Describe the task in one sentence. We’ll tell you whether it’s worth automating — and roughly what it would cost — on the first call. Twenty minutes, free, no presentation.

Book a 20-minute call

Or work the number out yourself — the calculator.