Automation Audit: How It Works and What to Automate First

An automation audit maps how your business actually runs, finds the tasks where automation pays off fastest and turns them into a prioritised plan with fixed prices. At PPY Solutions it takes 2–5 days, starts with a free 15-minute fit check and ends with a written roadmap. The best first candidate is almost always a boring, repeatable process whose current cost you can already measure.

What happens in an automation audit?

We look at processes and systems together, because most of the waste lives in the gaps between tools. A typical audit has four parts:

• Process mapping: who does what, in which system, how often and how long it takes.
• Quick wins: tasks that can be automated within days, not months.
• Effort and ROI: for each candidate, the expected effort and the time or money it frees up.
• Roadmap: a prioritised backlog with a fixed price for each step.

You don't need perfect data to start. We work with what you have and improve data quality as part of the automation.

How long does it take and what does it cost?

Our audit takes 2–5 days. As a fixed-price package, the System Check costs €1,490 and delivers an audit of your existing system plus a written modernisation roadmap in 2–3 days. Before that, a free 15-minute fit check tells you whether there is a worthwhile opportunity at all. If there isn't, we say so.

Which process should you automate first?

Most AI projects stall because teams start with the flashiest idea instead of the right one. We use a three-question test:

• Is it boring and repeatable? If a person does it the same way every week, a machine can do it. Creative, judgment-heavy work is a risky first target.
• Can you measure the before? "Saves time" is a feeling. "12 quotes a day, 4 minutes each" is a baseline you can prove the return against.
• Is a wrong answer recoverable? Start where a mistake is a shrug, not a lawsuit, and keep a human in the loop for the first few weeks.

Pick the process that scores yes on all three, automate it end to end, prove the hours saved and use that win to fund the next one.

Which tasks make good first jobs for an AI agent?

These five jobs exist in almost every SME, and we tackle them roughly in this order:

• Triage inbound: every email and form is read, classified and routed with priority and owner before anyone opens the inbox.
• Answer the repeats: the recurring questions that make up most of your support volume. The AI drafts, a human reviews until trust is established.
• Capture and qualify leads: web forms are enriched, scored and followed up automatically if nobody replies.
• Book and reschedule: the agent handles the back-and-forth in the calendar.
• Summarise and follow up: every meeting gets a summary, every action item a reminder.

What we deliberately leave out at the start: brand content and unmoderated replies to customer reviews. Those need judgment your team is better at.

What does a good audit result look like?

A useful audit ends with decisions, not a slide deck. Take a security assessment we carried out on a client's internal business dashboard. In one working day we reviewed 907 API routes and server actions and checked the live server, backups and cloud storage, strictly read-only. The result was 62 findings, 7 of them critical, and every critical one was verified on the live system.

Most importantly, the client got a ranked action plan split into today, this week, this month and this quarter, with an owner and an effort estimate for every item. The two most critical issues could be closed with under an hour of developer work. That is the standard we aim for in every audit: concrete, ranked and clear about who does what.

What happens after the audit?

The first milestone is built in a build sprint of 2–4 weeks, including integrations, logging, deployment and handover. A typical first sprint looks like this:

• Week 1: automate the one or two daily workflows that drain the most time.
• Week 2: build a dashboard so the owner can see the impact.
• Week 3: train the team and hand over the "off switch".
• Week 4: measure, adjust and scope the next phase.

After that, many clients continue with a monthly retainer for continuous improvements and new workflows.

FAQ

Do we need to prepare anything for the audit?

Access to the relevant systems and a person who knows the process day to day. Rough numbers on how often a task happens and how long it takes help a lot.

Does the audit change anything in our systems?

No. An audit is analysis. The security assessment above, for example, was read-only: we changed nothing, created no accounts and stored no secrets. You decide what gets fixed and when.

Can we start with a single process?

Yes, that is exactly how we recommend starting: pick one painful process, automate it, measure the impact, then expand.

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