Business automation
Every company runs on a few processes nobody ever chose: a quote re-typed into three systems, an invoice waiting two days for a signature, a report someone rebuilds every Monday morning. We map those, automate the ones worth automating, and connect the tools you already pay for, so the work happens on its own and your team goes back to the part that needs a human.
Signals
If two of these are true, the manual work already costs more every quarter than automating it would cost once.
Someone opens the same five tabs every morning and moves the same data between them.
A customer waits two days for a quote that took eleven minutes of actual work.
Every system holds its own version of the truth, and reconciling them is somebody's job.
Month-end takes a week, and it takes a week because of copying, not because of thinking.
You hired someone to keep up with volume, and most of what they do is data entry.
Things fall through the cracks and nobody notices until the client does.
The math
A task that takes twelve minutes and happens forty times a week is a full-time job you never posted. This is roughly what those tasks look like before and after, in the processes we are asked about most.
Roughly, for a team of ten≈ 28 h / week
Illustrative figures from processes we have automated, not a forecast for your company. The first thing we do is measure yours, because a process that turns out to cost two hours a month is one we will tell you not to automate.
What we do
Most projects start with a single painful process and grow from there. You do not have to automate the whole company to get the first win.
The end-to-end processes that cross three systems and two people. We build them on n8n, self-hosted on your own infrastructure, so every step is visible and editable instead of buried inside somebody's SaaS account.
Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, and PDFs that arrive as attachments and leave as rows in your system. AI extraction where the format keeps changing, plain rules where it does not.
The connector that does not exist yet, between the ERP nobody wants to touch and the tool your team actually uses. Built properly, with error handling and a way to know when it stops.
For the steps where rules run out: reading a message and deciding what it is about, drafting the reply, summarising a call. Used where judgment is needed, and only there.
Examples
None of these are hypothetical. They are what we are asked about most, and each one is small enough that the first is usually running within a month.
How we work
We do not open with a platform decision or a six-month discovery. We start with the process that hurts most, put it into production, and let it pay for the next one.
01Estimate: Week 1
We sit with the people doing the work and time it: how often, how long, how many systems, and where it breaks. Half the value shows up here, because most processes carry a step nobody can justify anymore.
DeliverableA timed map of the process as it really runs
02Estimate: Week 1
Every candidate scored on hours, error cost, effort, and risk. We deliberately pick a boring first one: high volume, low ambiguity, and visible to whoever signs off on the budget.
DeliverableA ranked shortlist and the first workflow scoped
03Estimate: Week 2–3
The workflow built on n8n in your own environment and wired into the systems that hold the data, with retries, error paths, and the approval steps where a human has to stay in the loop.
DeliverableA working workflow in a staging environment
04Estimate: Week 3–4
We run the automation alongside the manual process for a week and compare every case. Nothing gets switched off until it has handled the awkward ones correctly.
DeliverableA comparison report and the sign-off to cut over
05Estimate: Ongoing
Your team gets the documentation, the credentials, and a working session on editing the workflow themselves. Then we take the next process off the list.
DeliverableDocumentation, access, and the next candidate scoped
The timings and hours on this page are estimates drawn from past projects, not a quote. Yours depend on how many systems are involved, how clean the data is, and how quickly approvals move on your side.
When it breaks
Most automations are not abandoned because they stop working. They are abandoned because they stop working quietly. Everything we build is designed to be loud about failure and boring to fix.
APIs go down and rate limits happen. A failed step waits and tries again instead of dropping the record on the floor.
When something cannot be resolved automatically, a specific person hears about it in the channel they already read, with the record attached.
Every run is logged with its input, its output, and the decisions in between, so you can answer what happened to that order six weeks later.
Anything above a threshold, anything going to a customer, and anything irreversible stops for a human. You decide where those lines sit.
Keys live in a vault, not inside a workflow, and each integration gets the narrowest permissions that still let it do its job.
Each workflow ships with a written explanation of what it does, what it touches, and how to turn it off in a hurry.
Tools
We are not resellers and nobody pays us to recommend a platform. n8n is our default because it self-hosts, it has no per-task pricing, and the workflows are files you own. If you already run Make or Power Automate and it fits, we will build inside it.
Engagement
Same team and same standards in all three. The difference is how much you commit to before you have seen it work.
One process, a fixed price, and a workflow running in production at the end of it. The cleanest way to find out whether this works for your company.
Best for
A first automation, a painful process you can name today, or a budget that has to be approved up front.
Includes
A monthly engagement working through the backlog: a new workflow every few weeks, plus the changes the existing ones need as the business moves.
Best for
Companies with more than one process worth automating, which is most of them after the first sprint.
Includes
We take over automations that already exist, whether they were built in-house, by a freelancer, or on a platform you have outgrown, stabilise them, and keep them running.
Best for
Workflows that break weekly, a per-task bill that keeps climbing, or a person who left and took the knowledge with them.
Includes
No lock-in
We build on self-hosted n8n for a reason. The workflows are files in your repository, running on your servers, against your credentials. There is no per-task meter, no vendor sitting on your process, and no export you have to ask permission for.
Proof
Products we run ourselves and systems we built for clients, with the decisions behind each one.
Questions
A first sprint is fixed-price, and for most single processes it lands somewhere between one and three months of what that process costs you in salary today. We quote after the mapping week, so you approve a number instead of an hourly rate. If the process turns out to be worth less than the build, we say so before quoting.
The ones we pick first usually pay back in three to six months, which is exactly why we pick them first. The way to get there is to automate something high-volume and unambiguous before anything clever, and to measure the hours beforehand so the payback is a number rather than a feeling.
Zapier and Make are excellent until your volume makes them expensive or your process needs a step they do not have. n8n self-hosts, has no per-task bill, and lets us write real code inside a step, so a workflow can grow past the toy stage. If you already run Make and it fits your volume, we will build inside it and tell you to keep it.
It will, usually because a system you depend on changed something without telling anyone. Every workflow has retries, an error path, and an alert to a named person with the failed record attached, so it becomes a ten-minute fix instead of a silent gap you find in the month-end numbers.
In nearly every project we run, the gain is capacity: the same team handling more, or stopping work that should never have been manual. Where a role genuinely changes, we say it plainly in the report, because people notice these things before the announcement and it goes badly when they are right.
No, but expect the mapping week to fix some of them. Automating a broken process only makes it break faster, so part of the work is deleting the steps that exist because of a system you replaced in 2019. That cleanup often pays for itself before a single workflow is built.
That is the intent. n8n is visual, the workflows are documented, and we run a working session at handover. Most clients end up editing the simple parts themselves and calling us for the integrations. We would rather be optional and still chosen.
Usually not, and we will say so even though we build AI systems. Most of the hours in a company go to moving structured data between systems, which rules handle more cheaply and more predictably than a model. AI earns its place where the input is messy or the step needs judgment, and we use it there.
Send us the one your team complains about. We will come back with whether it is a good first candidate, roughly what it costs you today, and what it would take to make it run on its own.
The first conversation is free. If the honest answer is that a better spreadsheet would fix it, that is what you will hear.