What is an operations audit, and is it worth $1,200?

An operations audit, sometimes called a business process audit, is a structured look at how the recurring work in your firm actually gets done. Ours takes half a day on site and ends with a written, costed roadmap of what is worth automating and what isn't. It costs A$1,200, and the full fee comes off your first build if you go ahead within 30 days.

Whether it's worth it depends on your firm. For some it's the cheapest way to stop guessing. For others it's money you don't need to spend, and I'll say which is which below.

I wrote this for owners and partners of established firms: accountants, law firms, consultancies, brokers, practices and trades businesses with staff and a steady flow of work. Below is what happens in the half day, what the roadmap contains, when to skip it, and a rough version you can run yourself.

What is a business process audit?

It's a map of the work nobody bills for. Every recurring task, who does it, how long it takes and where it goes wrong.

Most firms have never written this down. The work lives in people's heads and inboxes. One person knows how invoices get chased. Another knows which forms a new client needs. When they're away, it slows down or stops.

An audit puts all of that on one page. Then it asks a harder question about each task: should this be automated, fixed, or left alone?

Why fix the process before you automate it?

Because automating a messy process gives you the same mess, just faster.

If three people chase overdue invoices three different ways, a tool built around one of them will annoy the other two. If your client data sits in a spreadsheet, an old CRM and someone's phone, any automation that reads it will be working from bad information.

So the order matters. Clean the data and get it into one place. Agree on one way of doing the job. Then automate only the steps that are repeatable and low risk.

I often tell people not to automate something. If a task needs real judgement every time, or the process isn't settled yet, software makes it worse. A good audit says that out loud.

What happens in the half day?

We sit with you and the people who do the work. Usually the owner or a partner, plus whoever runs the office or the accounts.

We go through every recurring task and write down four things: what it is, who does it, how often, and how long it takes. Then we look at the tools it touches. Your accounting software, your inbox, your job or practice management system, the spreadsheets.

Each task gets scored on two things:

1. Time. How much of the week it eats, and whose week.
2. How cleanly it can be automated. A job that runs the same way every time is easy to automate reliably. A job that needs someone to weigh things up takes more building and more testing before it's safe.

That second score is also what drives the price of any build later. One system with clear rules is a small job. Two or three systems talking to each other is a bigger one.

What do you get at the end?

A written roadmap. It lists what to build first, what each build would cost, and what it should give back. It also lists what not to automate, and why.

The roadmap is yours to keep whatever you decide. Use it with us, with someone else, or on your own.

If you do build with us, each automation is quoted from the roadmap as one fixed price, agreed before work starts. There are no run fees and no minimum terms. And anything that goes live starts in approval mode: it drafts and waits for a person to say yes before it acts.

What should an audit look at in a professional services or trades firm?

We've written up the recurring admin for a few sectors in more detail, such as fire protection firms, insurance brokers and trades businesses.

These are the five areas we start with in most firms:

• Enquiry handling. Where web and phone enquiries land, who picks them up, and how long a reply takes. I wrote more about the cost side of this in what an AI CRM costs in Australia.
• Quoting. How a quote gets built, who checks it, and whether anyone follows up when it goes quiet.
• Invoicing and chasing. How completed jobs or billable hours turn into invoices, and who chases the late ones. Xero's small business data puts the average Australian invoice at 22.9 days to get paid in the June 2026 quarter, with payment arriving 6 days past the due date on average (Xero, late payment guide). Chasing is repetitive, rule-based work, which makes it a common first candidate.
• Reporting. Who pulls the month's numbers together, from how many places, and how many hours that takes.
• Onboarding. The forms, documents, access and first meeting every new client goes through, and how much of it relies on someone remembering.

You can see the automations we build most often on our process automation page.

When is an operations audit not worth it?

There are three cases where I'd tell you to keep your $1,200.

Your firm is very small. If it's you and one other person and you both know where every job is, a formal audit is overkill. Sit down for an hour with the DIY version below.

There's no repeatable work. If every matter or project is genuinely different and needs judgement from start to finish, there isn't much to automate. You'd be paying to hear that.

You already know exactly what to build. If you've mapped the process, the data is clean and you can describe the job step by step, skip the audit. Ask for a quote on the build instead.

The audit earns its fee when the admin is clearly eating the week but nobody can say where to start.

What to do this week

You can run a rough business process audit yourself. It won't be as thorough, but it will tell you whether a proper one is worth paying for.

1. List the recurring jobs. Ask everyone in the office to write down the admin they do every week or month. Leave out the client work itself.
2. Put a time on each one. A rough number of hours a month is enough. Note who does it.
3. Mark each job on two questions. Does it happen the same way every time? What happens if it goes wrong? Same way every time and low stakes is a candidate. Everything else stays with a person for now.
4. Circle the messy ones. Any job done three different ways by three people needs fixing before anyone automates it.

If the list is short and the hours are small, you probably don't need an audit. If it runs to a page and the hours add up to a day a week or more, a proper look is likely worth it.

If the admin is eating your week and you're not sure where to start, we run a half-day operations audit. Or just book a 20-minute call and we'll tell you whether you need one.