Time Leak Audit
I map how the work happens today, estimate the hours that could be recovered and rank the opportunities against your goals. Under two hours of your time.
From £950 · fixed fee · excluding VATAutomate reporting and alerts
Nobody should have
to ask where
the work stands.
The information exists. It is scattered across a spreadsheet, an inbox and one person’s head, so finding out anything means interrupting somebody.
At a glance
- The task
- A view the team can read, and an alert when something slips
- Who it hits
- Anyone running several clients, projects or matters at once
- What changes
- One current view, alerts on exception, and a weekly digest nobody has to build
- Proof
- Premium Paye, a payroll firm with around 200 client companies, see below
The problem
Three things go wrong
when nobody can see the work
The client chases you. Not because anything is late, but because nobody told them where things were, and the update was sitting on somebody’s list behind more urgent work.
A deadline passes quietly. Nobody decided to miss it. It simply was not visible to the person who could have acted, and by the time it surfaced it had become a problem rather than a task.
Work gets delivered and not invoiced. This is the expensive one, and the one founders find hardest to believe until they look. A stage is signed off, the next stage starts, and the invoice for the one just finished never gets raised.
A missed deadline shows up eventually. Work you did and never billed usually does not show up at all.
The change
What it looks like before,
and after
Today, by hand
- The current state lives in a spreadsheet, an inbox and somebody’s memory
- Finding out where anything stands means asking a person
- Client updates get written one at a time, usually in the evening
- Deadlines depend on somebody remembering at the right moment
- The founder runs a personal list of daily checks that only exists in their head
- Nobody can say which work was delivered but never invoiced
Once it runs itself
- One current view of every client, project or matter in progress
- Client updates drafted from the data, so the work is reviewing rather than writing
- An alert when a date passes, a stage completes or a threshold is crossed
- Alerts on exception only, so an empty inbox means nothing needs you
- A weekly digest that arrives without anyone building it
- A flag when work is marked complete and no invoice has followed
≈12 → <1hours of admin in a busy month, at a payroll firm serving around 200 client companies
Premium Paye
Invoicing rebuilt by hand, direct debits keyed one client at a time, paperwork chased by email. Three connected processes took the manual work out of the month.
Read the case studyHow we get there
Three paid phases.
You decide after each one.
This one usually starts with a cleanup. The data exists, and it has to be trustworthy before anything can be built on top of it.
Process Design
A working session with your team, then detailed mapping: the steps, the data, the business rules and the exceptions that decide how the build behaves.
Separately scoped · fixed fee · excluding VATImplementation and handover
I build it in the tools you already use, test it against the agreed scenarios, document it and show your team how to run it without me.
Fixed project price · quoted after Process DesignBefore any of it, a free fifteen minute conversation. Bring the process as it actually happens, not as it should.
Is this a dashboard project?
Only if a dashboard is what you would actually open. Most founders do not want another screen to check. They want to be told when something needs them, and to have the weekly summary arrive without building it. The view matters most for the team. The alert matters most for you.
How do you decide what triggers an alert?
You do, and it is the part worth spending time on. We define the threshold once: how late is late, how stale is stale, what counts as done. Then the alert fires only when it is crossed. The aim is that an empty inbox genuinely means nothing needs you, because an alert nobody trusts is worse than no alert.
Do we need a new tool for this?
Usually not. This tends to be built on the tools you already pay for, because the data is already in them. What is missing is that nothing reads across them. If a new tool is genuinely required I will say so, and say what it costs, before anything is built.
Our data is a mess. Is it too early?
It is almost always a mess, and that is part of the job rather than a reason to wait. Agreeing what a complete record looks like, and getting the existing ones there, is usually the first phase of the work.
Will this replace our management meeting?
No, and it should not. It changes what the meeting is for. When everyone arrives already knowing the state of the work, the time goes on the decisions rather than on the status round.
Keep reading
Related
Your business
Where does the work stand
right now?
If answering that needs a conversation with three people and a spreadsheet, there is something worth fixing.
15 minutes · No charge
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