The automation audit: finding $4k monthly in manual work

Last month I ran an automation audit on a five person team and found four thousand dollars of monthly manual work hiding in plain sight. The method is embarrassingly simple. For one week, everyone logs every task that takes more than ten minutes and repeats weekly. Not special projects. The repetitive stuff your brain filters out as just part of the job. The log filled with zombies: copying form entries into a spreadsheet, reconciling two lists by hand, sending the same invoice reminder with names swapped, updating a dashboard that a query could refresh. We automated six of the eleven zombies in three weeks. The team's question changed from do we have time for automation to how did we ever afford not to. Your tolerances are expensive. Audit them.