The short answer
Automate first the work that happens often, follows clear rules and consists of copying data from one system to another. In most companies with 10 to 100 people, that means one of five processes: getting new enquiries into the CRM, entering orders into accounting, processing supplier invoices, building the weekly report, and chasing follow-ups and payments. Pick the one with the most hours behind it, not the most impressive one.
Below is a method to find that process in your own company in an afternoon, with the numbers to back the decision, and a plain comparison of the tools you can use.
List the work that repeats
Ask each team one question: what do you do every day or every week that feels like copying? Typical answers: typing orders from email into the accounting program, updating the same customer in two systems, exporting numbers to a spreadsheet for a report, sending the same reminder email.
You will find more than you expect. In a Smartsheet survey, over 40% of workers said they spend at least a quarter of their week on manual, repetitive tasks, with email, data collection and data entry taking the most time. It is a vendor survey, but it matches what we see when we map processes.
Score each task in euros
For every task, write down four numbers. Then multiply.
Hourly cost: average gross wage Q2 2026 (€1,886, Central Statistical Bureau) plus 23.59% employer social tax, per hour. Use your own team's wages; errors and delays come on top.
Then add two questions with a yes or no: does a mistake here cost money (a wrong invoice, a lost order)? Are the rules clear enough to write down? Tasks with many hours, costly mistakes and clear rules go to the top. What manual work really costs shows the full calculation, and the savings calculator does it for you.
Five processes that usually win
Lead intake. Enquiries from the website, email and phone go straight into the CRM with an owner and an instant reply, instead of waiting in an inbox. See leads fall through the cracks.
Order entry. Orders arriving by email or from the online shop are created in the ERP or accounting program without retyping. In companies that sell goods this is often the single biggest block of manual hours.
Supplier invoices and approvals. Invoices are read, matched to the order and routed for approval. Ardent Partners reports that best-in-class accounts payable teams process invoices 82% faster and at a 78% lower cost than their peers. With structured e-invoices between Latvian companies mandatory from 2028, this flow will change anyway.
The weekly report. Numbers are pulled from CRM, accounting and spreadsheets into one live dashboard instead of being rebuilt every Friday.
Follow-ups and payment reminders. A task or an email goes out when a quote has had no answer for five days or an invoice is overdue.
Simplify before you automate
Automating a bad process makes the mistakes faster. Before building anything, ask whether each step is needed at all. A report nobody reads should be deleted, not automated. An approval that is always granted can become a notification.
This is where a short process map pays for itself: steps that looked necessary turn out to exist only because two systems do not talk to each other.
Zapier, Make, n8n or a custom integration?
No-code tools are the right start for simple, low-volume flows. They differ mainly in how they charge.
Prices from the vendors' pricing pages, annual billing, checked 1 November 2026.
A custom integration wins when one of four things is true: the volume is high and per-step pricing gets expensive, data has to sync both ways between systems, errors must be caught and retried rather than silently dropped, or the data must stay with an EU provider you choose. It is also the only option when one of the systems has no ready-made connector, which is common with local accounting programs.
Our automations and integrations usually go live within two to four weeks, with error alerts sent to your chat.
Start with one, measure, then the next
Automate the top task, measure the hours it saves for a month, and only then start the next one. The first automation pays for the second, and the team sees it working before you ask them to change anything else.
Checklist: choosing your first automation
Every team has named the work that feels like copying.
Each task has a monthly count, minutes per time and a cost a year.
The top task has clear rules and costly mistakes.
Unnecessary steps were removed before anything was automated.
The tool choice fits the volume, the systems involved and where the data may be stored.
There is a date to measure the result before starting the next automation.
