Manual Processes in a Small Business: Where They Hide

A manual process is a repeated task where a person does every step by hand. In a small business, most of them go unnoticed because they look like normal work: an inbox that doubles as a to-do list, numbers retyped between tools, a spreadsheet only one person understands. You find them by looking at what people actually did last week, not at what the process is supposed to be.

This article is about finding that work and putting a number on it. It does not argue that everything should be automated. For that decision, see when to automate a process.

Key takeaways

• Manual work hides where it feels like part of the job: the inbox, copy and paste between tools, spreadsheets used as databases, approvals by email and recurring reports.
• Five signs give it away: one person owns it "because they know how", the same data is typed twice, work waits for someone, errors keep appearing in the same place, and nobody can describe the steps without opening the tools.
• A 10-minute audit of last week's calendar and inbox finds most of it. Tag each task as repeated, rules-based or error-prone.
• Cost it with one line: times per week x minutes x hourly cost x 52.
• Some manual steps are worth keeping. Anything that needs judgment or a personal touch should stay with a person.

What counts as a manual process?

A manual process is any repeated task where a person carries out each step and no tool does it for them. The test is simple. If the steps could be written as a short list of rules, and a person still performs every one, it is manual.

That is different from work that needs a human. Writing a proposal for a new client is manual work, but it is not a manual process in the problem sense, because each one is different. Re-entering that client's details into your invoicing tool, your calendar and your project board is a manual process, because the steps are identical each time.

Researchers use a related term, "work about work". Asana defines it as the activities that take time away from meaningful work, such as searching for information, moving between tools and tracking down progress updates. In its Anatomy of Work Index, a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers, Asana reports that about 60% of time at work goes to it (Asana, Why work about work is bad). The page does not give a year and the figure comes from a vendor survey of knowledge workers in larger companies, so treat it as a direction rather than a measure of your business. Still, it matches what most small teams feel: much of the day goes on moving information around, not on the work clients pay for.

Where does manual work hide? Five places to look first

You do not need a consultant to find manual work. Start with these five places. They account for most of it in service businesses, shops, studios and small agencies.

1. The inbox used as a to-do list

Every request arrives by email, so the inbox becomes the queue. Someone reads each message, decides what it is, copies the details somewhere and replies. The work is invisible because it never appears on a board. Look for: enquiry forms that land as plain emails, "can you send me..." requests that repeat, and unread flags used as reminders.

2. Copy and paste between tools

A customer is added to the CRM, then the invoicing tool, then the mailing list, then the project board. Each step takes two minutes. Smartsheet's survey of workers found data collection and data entry among the most time-consuming repetitive tasks, along with email (Smartsheet, workers waste a quarter of the work week on manual, repetitive tasks). The page does not state the sample size or the year, and the report it links to appears to date from 2017, so use it for the pattern, not the percentages. The pattern holds: if the same name, address or order number is typed in two places, you have double data entry.

3. Spreadsheets used as databases

A spreadsheet starts as a quick list and turns into the system of record: stock, bookings, leads, client status. It works until two people edit it, a column gets renamed or someone sorts one column and not the rest. The manual part is everything around it: checking it, fixing it, copying rows out of it and asking whoever built it what a cell means.

4. Approvals and updates by email

A quote needs sign-off. A design needs a yes. A booking needs a check. So someone sends a message, waits, reminds, and logs the answer by hand. Smartsheet's respondents named approvals (36%) and status updates (32%) among the tasks they most wanted automated, after data collection (55%). The waiting is the real cost: the task itself takes a minute, but the job sits for two days.

5. Recurring reports, invoices and onboarding

Anything done "every Monday" or "for every new client" is a candidate. Typical cases:

• A weekly report assembled from numbers in three tools.
• Invoices built from a quote that already contains the data.
• The same welcome email, folder structure and checklist for each new client.
• Monthly figures pasted into a deck for an accountant or a partner.

These are the easiest to spot because they have a rhythm. They are also the ones most likely to be done differently by each person.

What are the signs that a process is manual and fragile?

Five signs show up before anything visibly breaks:

If you see two or more in one task, it is worth a closer look. The last sign matters most. A process you cannot describe is a process you cannot improve, and drawing it is the fastest way to see where the waste sits. Our guide on how to create a process map shows how to do that in an afternoon.

How do you run a 10-minute audit?

You can audit your own week in ten minutes with a calendar, an inbox and a pen.

1. Open last week's calendar and sent mail. List every recurring task you or your team did, even small ones. Aim for 15 to 25 lines.
2. Next to each, write how many times it happened and roughly how long it took.
3. Tag each line with any of three letters:
   • R for repeated: it happens at least weekly.
   • S for rules-based: you could write the steps as a list with no "it depends".
   • E for error-prone: a mistake here has already cost time or money.
4. Circle everything with two or more tags.
5. Ask each person on the team to add what they do that you did not list. The owner rarely sees the whole picture.

Copy this table into a note and fill it in:

Do not try to be exact. Rough numbers are enough to rank the list. If two people give very different times for the same task, that is a finding in itself: the process is done two ways.

What you just did is a small business process audit: a list of recurring work, who does it, how long it takes and where it goes wrong. It needs no software and no workshop. Repeat it every six months, because new tools and new hires bring new manual steps.

What do manual processes cost?

The cost of a manual process is the time it takes, multiplied by how often it happens and by what that time is worth, plus the cost of its errors. The first part is easy to calculate.

Cost per year = times per week x minutes each / 60 x hourly cost x 52

Here is a worked example with invented round numbers, so replace them with yours.

On these numbers, three ordinary tasks use more than five full working weeks a year. That is before counting errors. Add one more line for those: how often a wrong invoice, missed reply or double booking happens, and what each one costs to fix, including the apology.

Do not stop at hours. Waiting time often matters more than working time. A quote that sits two days for approval loses deals even if the approval takes thirty seconds.

What should you do once you have found them?

Finding the work is the first half. The second is choosing what to do with each item, and there are three options, in this order:

• Fix: remove the step if it adds nothing. Many approvals and reports exist only because they always did.
• Simplify: standardise it. One form, one template, one place for the data.
• Automate: let a tool do the repeated steps once the process is stable.

Skipping straight to automation repeats a bad process faster. The signs that a task is ready, a payback calculation and the cases where you should not automate are in when to automate a process. Use your audit list as the input for that decision.

Which manual steps are worth keeping?

Not every manual step is waste. Keep a task manual when:

• It needs judgment. Pricing an unusual job or deciding whether to take a client.
• The personal touch is the product. A thank-you note to a long-standing customer, or a call after a complaint.
• It happens rarely. A task done twice a year does not repay the effort of changing it.
• It is a deliberate check. A person reading a contract before it goes out is a control, not a bottleneck.

The aim is not zero manual work. It is that people spend their time on the parts where a person makes a difference, and not on retyping.

Where to start this week

Run the audit on one team and one week. Pick the three lines with the highest yearly cost and the most tags. Write down their steps as a plain list. That list is your starting point, whether you then fix the process, simplify it or hand it to a tool.

If you want a second pair of eyes, our process optimization service starts with exactly this: looking at how work moves through a business, mapping it and recommending what to change. Lobos Design is a two-person studio in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria working remotely with clients in several countries.