How much does it cost to automate admin for a small business in the UK?
It depends on the job, and the best way to find out is a free 30 minute call where we scope it together. As a rough guide, most jobs are priced between £520 and £3,500, and a smaller one costs less. You can pay up front, or spread the cost monthly.
Start with a free 30 minute call
On the call I ask about what is slow or repetitive and you talk. I will ask for a few numbers, such as how many quote requests come in a week and how long they take to answer, so there is something to measure against later.
After the call, and a closer look at how you work if the job needs one, you get a written scope: what I would build, what it would cost, and how you can pay for it. If I cannot see something worth doing, I say so and nobody has spent any money. I work with businesses in south west London, and anywhere in the UK remotely.
Rough figures, not a price list
These are worked out from how long my builds have taken so far. They show the size of things. If your job is smaller than any of them, the price is smaller too.
- A simple automation: around £520, one day of my time. One trigger and a few steps, such as "when a quote request email arrives, put it in the spreadsheet and send the customer a holding reply". Or a look at how your admin runs, with a written report on what is worth automating and in which order.
- A standard workflow: around £1,200. The same kind of automation built to last: it copes when something goes wrong, keeps a log, comes with written instructions, and is handed over properly.
- A complex workflow: £2,400 to £3,500. Several systems joined up, messy or unstructured data, or AI making a judgment somewhere in the middle.
- Smaller jobs, and changes to what I have built for you: £65 an hour.
No figure on this page is a quote for your job. The scope after the call is.
Spreading the cost
If one bill is hard to fit in, there are two ways to spread it:
- Up to three monthly payments. The price of a build split over no more than three months, the first before work starts. This costs a little more than paying up front, and the quote says how much.
- A monthly retainer, from £325 a month. That is 5 of my hours a month at £65 an hour. I build it as soon as the first month is paid, and the hours the build needs set how many months you commit to. After that the retainer carries on and the hours go on your next job, until you give 30 days notice.
How the figure for your job is reached
I estimate the hours the build will take, including what my own AI tools cost me, and that sets the price of the whole job. Any tools it runs on afterwards sit in your own account, on your own card. On jobs of £1,200 and up, two rounds of changes are included, and a check a few months after launch, to confirm it still works, is part of the same price rather than an extra.
Why you have probably been quoted so much before
If you have asked for a small change to your systems before and been quoted a figure that made you walk away, you are not alone. Someone at a small firm I spoke to put it this way: "There are just lots of things the way that our system works that are really inefficient." The prices they had been quoted for past work were so high that the work never went ahead.
My read is that the old price reflected the old method. Someone had to write all the code by hand, so even a small job meant paying for an engineer's time to write it. The tools I build with now do most of that typing, which is what brings the cost of a small job down. That is my view of why, not something a customer has told me, so take it as that.
What you are actually paying for
The hours that matter are the ones spent understanding how your business runs, not the ones spent typing. That is why the call comes first, and why it is free.
Getting started
Email me and we will find half an hour. No obligation after the call. If the answer is that your admin is fine as it is, that is a perfectly good outcome and I will say so.