Workflow automation
Workflow automation for the work done by hand.
Invoices, dockets, approvals, timesheets and the weekly report. If your team copies it from one place to another, we can usually engineer it out, with a person still checking anything uncertain.
01What it is
Most growing businesses run on a few people who know how everything works, and a lot of copying between systems. An invoice is read and typed into the ledger. Hours arrive on paper and are keyed into payroll, then again into job costs. The weekly report is rebuilt from the same spreadsheets every Monday.
Workflow automation is software that does that copying for you. It picks the information up where it starts, checks it, and puts it where it needs to go. The hard part is rarely the happy path. It’s the rules, the edge cases and what happens when something doesn’t match, and that’s where we spend our time.
02Where it pays
- Supplier invoices read and entered without the typing
- Hours captured once and reused for payroll, job costing and billing
- Claimed hours checked against site records before the pay run
- Enterprise agreement rules applied to every pay run
- Routine exceptions triaged automatically, the ambiguous ones sent to a person
- Admin joined up across the tools a small team already uses
03How we build it
Map it first
We sit with the people doing the work and write down every step, including the exceptions. That’s where most of the time goes.
People stay in the loop
Anything uncertain goes to a person with the reason attached. Nothing is guessed.
Fail loudly
Built to run unattended, and to raise an alert rather than fail silently when something unexpected arrives.
Measured, not promised
A baseline before, the numbers after, and the working shown.
Systems we’ve built
Questions owners ask
What kind of work can be automated?
Anything repetitive that follows rules, even messy ones: data entry, invoice processing, timesheets, approvals, reconciliations and reports. If someone on your team can explain how they decide, it can usually be written down as software. Where a judgement call is genuinely needed, the system prepares the work and a person makes the call.
Do we have to replace the software we already use?
No. We build inside the tools you already use, such as Xero or MYOB and your job management system, and connect them through their APIs, or through whatever routes are actually available where there is no API. Replacing a system is a separate decision, and usually not the first one.
Is this the same as Zapier or Power Automate?
Those tools are good at simple hand-offs between two apps, and we use them where they fit. They struggle with business rules, exceptions and volume. When a workflow needs those, we write software, built and tested like any other system you rely on.
What happens when the automation gets something wrong?
It’s designed not to guess. Uncertain items go to a person, failures raise an alert instead of disappearing, and every system comes with tests, logging, monitoring and a runbook, so anyone can see what happened and why.
How do we know it’s worth automating?
We measure how the work runs today before building anything, and agree in writing how success will be measured. Some workflows are not worth automating, and if yours is one of them we’ll say so.
Got work your team shouldn’t be doing by hand?
Tell us how the business runs and where the time goes. We’ll tell you honestly what’s worth building, and what isn’t.