What is a business automation audit? (And what should one cost?)

“Automation audit” is starting to appear on agency websites everywhere, describing everything from a free 30-minute sales call to a five-figure consulting engagement. Here is what the term should mean, and how to judge what you’re being offered.

What a real audit covers

A proper automation audit is a structured diagnostic of how work flows through your business. Done properly, it includes:

1. Workflow mapping. Interviews with the owner and the people doing the day-to-day work, tracing how work enters the business, who touches it, and where it sits waiting. The waiting points are usually where the money is.
2. Opportunity identification. A list of specific automatable workflows, not generic advice. “Your referencing chase costs 11 hours a week across three staff” rather than “you could benefit from AI”.
3. ROI quantification. Each opportunity priced: hours per week, cost of those hours, estimated build complexity, payback period. This is the part that separates an audit from a pitch.
4. A roadmap you could execute with anyone. The output should be useful even if you never hire the firm that wrote it. That’s the test of whether you bought analysis or marketing.

What it should cost in the UK

Free audits exist, and they are sales calls. There is nothing wrong with a sales call, but a 30-minute conversation cannot map your workflows or quantify anything; its job is to sell you the project. Paid audits in the UK typically run £750 to £2,500 for small and mid-sized businesses, taking one to three weeks. Ours is £950, takes two weeks, and the fee is credited if we build anything afterwards, which is a common and fair structure to look for.

Questions that expose a weak audit

• “Will you interview the people who actually do the work, or just me?” (Owner-only audits miss where the time really goes.)
• “Will each recommendation have a number on it?” (If not, you’re buying a brochure.)
• “Could I take the report to another developer?” (If the answer is evasive, the audit is a lock-in device.)
• “What happens if you find nothing worth automating?” (A real auditor accepts this outcome; it happens.)

When to skip the audit

If you already know exactly what you want built and it’s small, a scoping call for a fixed-price build is enough. The audit earns its fee when the symptoms are clear but the causes aren’t: everyone is busy, nobody can say precisely where the hours go.

That diagnostic is exactly what our Automation Audit does. If you want a two-minute preview of what it would find, start with the free self-audit.