There are trends about which processes get automated first not because they're a high priority but because they're the most painful to endure in a manual process but relatively easy to automate.
Expense Management Is Often the #1 Process
When finance teams are asked what the most painful manual process is, expense management comes up time and again. Receipt gathering, data input, approval routing, reconciliation; it's a painful process that happens every month like clockwork.
But expense management also quickly reaches a tipping point for companies wanting to learn how to automate. At five employees, it's annoying and tolerable to do manual expenses. At twenty employees, it's annoying enough to pay attention to. At fifty employees, it's an absolute nightmare.
Companies learn about expense management automation early because there's enough pain and enough solutions for expense automation. Expense management tools automatically scan and categorize receipts, approve workflows and integrations with accounting; manual work of ten hours turns into ten minutes.
The ROI also makes sense when it comes to expense automation. When an accounting team member spends ten hours a month sorting receipts and logging info—and expense automation comes in under that employee's worth, it pays for itself. Most companies reach that equation quickly.
Payroll Automation Follows Close Behind
There's too much risk associated with manual payroll. Employees don't get paid correctly and they get angry. Manual payroll is avoided due to holidays, sick days, or employee mistakes that lead to tax and compliance issues in the future.
Even small companies tend to automate payroll relatively early. Calculating withholdings, deductibles, taxes due and pay stub creation come with so many potential pitfalls once companies reach over five employees that payroll becomes automatic, accounted for with calculated taxes, direct deposit and check writing.
Payroll is handled automatically with calculated taxes, automatic direct deposit or check writing. Automatic systems stay updated with tax rules and report features keep accountability for appropriate management. It's one of those decisions that makes sense without debate.
Time Tracking Gets Automated When Management Gets Messy
For companies that bill by the hour or have project management systems in place, manual time tracking becomes a problem quickly. Time sheets, Excel sheets or merely asking people what they worked on turns from a best practice into inaccuracy and administrative burdens.
Automated time tracking systems let users punch in and out while on the job for instantaneous estimates. This information flows into project management systems, billing systems or payroll—no longer do people have to wait until they submit time sheets at the end of the week.
Sometimes the compound efficiency improvements help justify the switch. When work relies on billable hours, every minute counts. Automation helps time get tracked appropriately.
Invoicing & Accounts Receivable
It takes too much time to manually invoice—creating invoices in Word or Excel takes extra time sending PDF attachments out—and tracking who submits payments.
When invoices don't go out timely—or don't get followed up on—cash flow is jeopardized.
Automated invoicing systems create invoices per project milestones, time entries or recurring expectations, the system sends them out automatically and tracks who opens them in addition to following up on payment reminders.
Platforms like Lunos take this a step further by using AI to automate follow-ups and streamline accounts receivable workflows, reducing the need for manual intervention.
When money comes in, it registers as paid—even with minimal human intervention throughout the entire process.
For those companies that send more than three invoices in a month, it's saves hours every week.
Appointment Scheduling & Calendar Management
The constant back-and-forth about scheduling—is Tuesday good? No? How about Thursday? What time?—is painful for everyone involved.
Even worse is for service businesses, consultants or anyone who have their calendars inevitably managed by anyone but themselves.
Automated scheduling lets people book directly into their schedules—no more email threads or phone calls confirming possible days; the system shows windows of opportunity; people select what works; confirmation goes out.
It's not a huge convenience but companies who implement automated scheduling find a drastic reduction of time wasted scheduling events unnecessarily. No more ten emails about a single meeting; often the drop in no-show emails comes as a welcomed bonus.
Email Marketing & Customer Communications
At a certain point it's impossible to scale emailing customers or prospects manually anymore. It's tough enough creating personalized emails manually let alone keeping track of who's on what list, who got what message and private and confidential information—the less companies can do this as their number of contacts grow, the better.
Marketing automation tools help create email blast campaigns based on segmented audiences—to schedule time for sending—and track results without manually sending one email at a time. They send triggered emails based on customer actions (welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, follow-up).
Even companies that aren't "heavy" into marketing find basic email automation useful—keeping customers updated or following up with leads is a worthwhile proposition when communication can happen without constant manual interference.
Data Entry & File Management
Any task that requires transferring data from one location to another is one that should be automated. Invoice info into accounting systems; contact info into CRMs; form submissions into databases—they're painful and time-consuming data entry projects.
Integration tools help systems communicate for automatic flow—form submissions create CRM entries which trigger welcome emails and log into a marketing system—none of which require human involvement.
This saves time because it happens often enough. Even if every effort takes 1-3 minutes each—over the course of hundreds of instances—and even if each instance only takes 1-3 minutes—time piles up.
Why They Get Automated First
There seems to be a trend among the processes that companies most frequently automate first; they share similar characteristics:
They're repetitive (happening daily/periodically); they're rule-based (consistent nature); they take a long time to do manually; they're prone to errors if a human does it—and they impact either efficiency or revenues.
Thus the ROI makes sense and implementation is fairly straightforward. Companies see the problem, implement a solution and easily measure improvement afterward.
What Comes Later
More strategic processes requiring judgment come later—or not at all—hiring decisions; contract negotiations; relationship management—all take nuance and context that apply poorly through automated processes.
Complex operational processes differ by circumstances which also requires later engagement. Custom manufacturing; project management with one-time jobs; specialized systems—all can achieve partial automation but total automation fails miserably—and lacks value.
Processes that get automated first are those in which it clear that it's better than manual work—those that come later involve less obvious benefits or less logistical facilitation.
How Do Companies Make The Choice?
For companies wanting to go based on where others started to venture into their own automation journeys, it makes sense to start with processes that generally yield good results first.
There exists proven ROI in those systems with established solutions readily available for fairly straightforward implementation.
However they prioritize based upon where pain points are most readily available. A service company may find value in automating scheduling while product-based companies may similarly appreciate inventory management systems more highly than others. The trend exists—but automate what seems cyclically and time-intensive where it's clear it makes better sense than staying manual.
The value is getting started as opposed to trying to automate everything at once from the beginning. Assess what's too time-consuming and cumbersome and get it locked in—and then go from there for subsequent options second, following suit.
