Small business automation, tested
What repetitive work are you trying to get rid of?
Right now, a human being is the integration between two pieces of software in your business. That human is probably you. We build these workflows ourselves, run them, record what they actually cost, and tell you when the honest answer is to leave it alone.
- Start with the problem
- See the workflow run
- Read the evidence
- Choose with the tradeoffs in front of you
Where is the time going?
Lead follow-up
Enquiries that go cold in an inbox
Data entry
Typing the same thing into a second system
Order workflows
Re-keying orders into a picking sheet
When it breaks
Automations that fail without telling you
What it costs
Why the bill is not what the pricing page implied
When not to automate
The answer no vendor will give you
Problem → workflow → evidence → options
Every page here follows the same shape. We start with the problem in the words people actually use, show the workflow that addresses it, publish what happened when we ran it — including what broke — and only then discuss the tools. The free option is named first whenever it is genuinely the better answer.
I manually copy new website leads into a spreadsheet.
Every submission — for most small businesses that is 2 to 30 times a week.
I forget to follow up with leads after they submit a form.
Per lead, continuously.
I copy ecommerce orders into a fulfilment spreadsheet every day.
Daily, and it scales directly with order volume.
My automation broke and I did not find out until someone complained.
Occasional, but it is the single biggest reason people abandon automation.
Not sure the task is worth automating at all? The Automation Decision Sheet is free, needs no email address, and frequently ends in “don’t”.
How to read a claim here
Every statement on this site carries what kind of evidence sits behind it, and the date it was last checked. Nothing is presented as tested unless we ran it.
We ran it ourselves and kept the run log or output file.
Stated in the vendor’s own current documentation, cited and dated.
We looked and could not confirm it. We publish the gap rather than the guess.
What makes this different
Most automation content is written by the companies selling automation. They have no reason to tell you that Google Forms already writes to Google Sheets for free, that Looker Studio will do your reporting at no cost, or that self-hosted n8n is free forever. We say all three, because they are true.
We publish our commission rates as numbers, and we tell you when we earn nothing from the thing we just recommended.