Five tasks a small business can automate - and how to find them

Most of the small businesses I talk to don’t have an “IT problem”. They have an employee who spends Friday afternoon copying figures from the webshop into a spreadsheet. Or an owner who sends payment reminders by hand in the evening.

It isn’t dramatic. But it’s hours every week, year after year - and it’s exactly the kind of work the systems can do on their own.

How to recognise a good candidate

A task is worth automating when it is:

1. Repeated - it happens every day or every week, not once a year.
2. Rule-based - you can explain it to a new colleague as “if X, then do Y”.
3. Between two systems - someone moves data from one place to another by hand.

If a task ticks all three, it’s almost always a candidate. If it ticks only one, it rarely is.

1. Orders from the webshop to the accounts

The order sits in the webshop, but it also has to be booked in the accounts. Many people retype it by hand or export a file every week. The major Danish accounting packages and webshop platforms have APIs, so orders, customers and payments can flow across automatically - with a message to you if something doesn’t add up.

2. Reminders and follow-ups

Payment reminders, “thanks for your order” emails, following up on quotes that haven’t had a reply after a week. The rules are simple, and that’s exactly why they get forgotten when things are busy.

3. Product data and translations

Descriptions, SEO copy, categories and translations into several languages are a classic time sink in e-commerce. This is where AI can genuinely make a difference - if it’s done properly. For Illux I built a system that enriches products in four languages at once and sends the uncertain cases to a human for approval. It has enriched more than 3,000 products and saved hundreds of hours of manual work.

4. Enquiries that need to reach the right place

Emails from the contact form that need to go into a spreadsheet or CRM. Support emails that need sorting into “invoice”, “complaint” and “question”. Sorting text used to be hard to automate - today a small, cheap AI model can do it, and pass whatever it’s unsure about on to a human.

5. The weekly report

Every Monday, someone gathers figures from three systems into one spreadsheet so management can see how things are going. A small script can do that on Sunday night, so the report is waiting in the inbox.

When not to automate

• When the process keeps changing. Automate something that has settled, not something you’re still working out.
• When it’s a rare task. An hour a year isn’t worth an integration.
• When nobody notices if it goes wrong. An automation has to tell you when it fails. Otherwise silent failures are worse than manual work.

First step

Log one week: every time someone copies, types in or sends something by hand, note what it was and how long it took. The list is almost always longer than you’d think.

If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes on the list, I offer a free mini-audit: half an hour where you tell me where the time goes, and afterwards you get the three things I’d automate first, in writing. If the answer is “it isn’t worth it”, I’ll tell you that too.