What to automate in your company: 10 processes worth starting with, and how to choose the first

Automation means that software performs the repetitive part of the work according to set rules, while people deal with exceptions and decisions. Not every process is suitable for this. A good candidate meets most of the conditions below.

If a process meets only one or two of them, automation is unlikely to pay for itself. In that case it is better to improve the way the work is done, or to leave it as it is.

The easiest way to calculate the gain from automation is in hours. The formula is simple: number of repetitions per month × time saved per repetition × hourly labour cost. Add the cost of errors and delays if you can estimate it.

Take a hypothetical trading company with 80 employees. Its salespeople prepare 40 quotes a month, and each one takes them an hour. If after automation a quote takes 20 minutes, the company saves 40 × 40 minutes, or about 27 hours a month. At PLN 90 an hour, that is about PLN 2,400 a month and PLN 28,800 a year.

Subtract the monthly cost of licences and maintenance from the monthly saving. Divide the one-off set-up cost by what is left – the result is the number of months it takes for the investment to pay back. Measure the input data on a sample rather than from memory, because estimates “off the top of your head” are often far from reality.

1. Purchase invoices. From 1 February 2026 every company in Poland must receive invoices through KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System – the government platform for exchanging invoices between businesses. From 1 April 2026 most sellers must also issue invoices in it, so domestic invoices usually arrive as ready-made data rather than scans. Automation means the system downloads the invoice from KSeF, matches it to the purchase order and sends it to the right person for approval.

Reading data from scans (OCR, which converts an image of a document into text) now makes sense mainly for foreign invoices, receipts and documents that are not invoices. Many accounting systems already have a module for downloading invoices from KSeF, so start by checking what your current software offers.

2. Payment and deadline reminders. Every day the software checks which sales invoices are overdue, sends the customer a polite reminder and gives the accounts team a list of outstanding payments. Reminders about expiring contracts, inspections or certificates work the same way. This is usually the simplest process to start with, because all it needs is a date and one rule.

3. Leave, business travel and equipment requests. The employee fills in one form, the request goes to their manager in Teams or Outlook, and once it is approved HR receives the complete details. Nobody copies emails into a spreadsheet or hunts for who approved a holiday. If your HR system has its own request module, configuring it properly is often enough.

4. Preparing for a new employee. When HR enters a new starter’s details, the software creates tasks for the IT person, the line manager and the office administration: account, equipment, access rights, health and safety training, documents. Everyone sees their part, and the manager can see whether everything is ready before day one. This makes sense if you take on several people a month; with two hires a year, a checklist is enough.

5. Generating quotes. The salesperson selects the customer and products in the CRM, and the software creates a first draft of the quote from the current price list and the company template. The salesperson only checks and completes it. The condition: the price list and product descriptions must be in one up-to-date place, not spread across several Excel files.

6. Follow-up after meetings and sales reminders. After a conversation the salesperson records its outcome in the CRM, and the system sets reminders for the next contact and prepares a draft message. Enquiries from the website form go straight to the right person by region or product. This brings the most benefit to companies that lose potential customers because nobody got back to them after the first contact.

7. Reports for the management board. Instead of manually pulling together data from several systems every week, managers get a ready-made report in Power BI that refreshes automatically. The report can be emailed to the management board every Monday morning. The hardest part here is not the technology but agreeing a single definition for each indicator.

8. Document approvals. Contracts, discounted quotes and invoices without a purchase order go to the right people with a decision deadline, a reminder and a deputy for holiday periods. Every decision is recorded in the history. We describe the details in a separate guide on document approval workflows.

9. Alerts about matters that need action. The software watches for events that someone checks manually today: stock below a threshold, a new complaint, an important customer who has not ordered for two months. A notification arrives only when something needs to be done. It is important to keep alerts few – people quickly start ignoring too many notifications.

10. Moving data between systems. An order from the online shop goes straight into the warehouse system, and customer details from a form go into the CRM. Manual retyping and typos disappear. If a system has no ready-made connection, a robot that clicks through the software like a person can sometimes help, but that solution is more expensive and more prone to failure.

Many companies already pay for some of the tools. Microsoft 365 work accounts let you build cloud flows in Power Automate with so-called standard connectors – ready-made links to Outlook, SharePoint, Teams or Excel. For simple reminders, alerts and approvals this is usually enough.

An extra licence is needed when a flow uses premium connectors (e.g. to databases and many ERP systems), reads documents with AI Builder or runs a robot on a computer. In that case you need a Power Automate Premium licence per user. A robot running without human supervision also requires a Process licence. From 1 November 2026, reading documents with AI Builder also consumes Copilot credits, which are bought separately.

Apart from licences, the biggest cost is the work: describing the process, building the automation, testing and ongoing maintenance. The cost depends most on the number of systems to connect, the number of exceptions to the rule and the quality of the data. A simple reminder flow is on a different scale from connecting an online shop to an ERP system.

Not all manual work is a problem. If a process happens a few times a month and takes a quarter of an hour, automation will never pay for itself. It is better to write instructions and a checklist.

Automation also makes no sense when a process changes every few weeks, each department does it differently or the input data is incomplete. The software will then simply do quickly what is being done badly today. First agree one way of working and who is responsible for it.

Also be careful with processes in which every case requires expert judgement, such as pricing a non-standard order. Here automation can prepare the data and a draft, but the decision stays with a person.

The first project has two goals: to deliver a real saving and to teach the company how to introduce such changes. So choose a process that is small but noticeable. The plan might look like this: