Checklist

20 tasks to automate first

AgenIA · August 2026 · 6 min read

Not every task is equally worth automating. Some are risky to automate until you have reliable history behind them; others, highly repetitive and rarely subject to exceptions, pay for themselves within weeks. Here are twenty tasks common in smaller companies, sorted by area, each with what it actually costs while it stays manual and a pointer on how to go about it.

Finance & admin

1. Entering supplier invoices. Re-typing an amount, an invoice number and a date by hand costs a few minutes per invoice — but it repeats hundreds of times a year and produces most of the reconciliation errors. Automatic extraction (OCR + AI) removes the re-keying and makes the accounting classification dependable.
2. Bank reconciliation. Matching statement lines to invoices by hand is tedious and error-prone. Rule-based automatic reconciliation (amount, date, description) handles in seconds what takes hours every month.
3. Chasing unpaid invoices. Without automation, chasers go out late or never — usually for lack of time, not of will. A sequence scheduled by how late the payment is (day 7, day 15, day 30) improves payment terms mechanically.
4. Expense claims. Entering expenses by hand eats time for the employee and for the finance team. A photo of the receipt, followed by extraction and automatic allocation to a category, brings it down to seconds per claim.
5. Producing quotes and invoices. Copying the same details (contacts, services, terms) from one document to another is pure waste. A template fed automatically from the CRM removes the copying.

Sales & prospecting

6. Qualifying inbound leads. Sorting every incoming enquiry by hand (sector, size, urgency) delays the reply and loses the hot ones. Automatic AI triage prioritises and routes straight to the right salesperson.
7. Booking meetings. Email ping-pong to find a slot costs days, and prospects. A synchronised calendar with automatic confirmation and reminders removes the exchange entirely.
8. Following up prospects. A prospect who does not reply is too often forgotten, for want of systematic follow-up. Sequences scheduled on inactivity keep the contact alive with no manual effort.
9. Updating the CRM. Re-typing into the CRM what is already in an email or a form is avoidable double entry. Creating the record automatically from those sources keeps the CRM current for free.
10. Weekly sales reporting. Compiling the week's figures by hand (leads, meetings, closes) easily takes an hour. A dashboard generated automatically from the same data is available continuously.

Support & customer relations

11. Answering frequent questions. Answering the same questions several times a day (opening hours, lead times, prices) spends human time on low-value replies. An AI assistant connected to your documentation handles them around the clock.
12. Sorting incoming email. A shared inbox where everyone has to open and forward each message by hand slows everything down. Automatic categorisation and routing to the right team speeds up the response.
13. Sending confirmations. Confirming every order, appointment or delivery by hand is repetitive, and the risk of automating it wrongly is close to nil. Sending triggered by the event itself frees that time.
14. Satisfaction follow-up. Without automation, the post-job satisfaction survey is usually forgotten. An automatic send triggered at the end of an assignment guarantees systematic feedback.
15. Notes from meetings and calls. Taking notes in a meeting while taking part in it is hard, and writing the minutes afterwards takes time. Automatic transcription and summarising free your attention during the conversation.

HR & internal organisation

16. Team rotas. Building a rota by hand around everyone's availability, absences and skills takes time and produces mistakes. Generating it automatically from the declared constraints makes the result dependable.
17. Onboarding new starters. Gathering and sending a new starter's documents, access and information by hand is easy to do half of. An automated checklist and send guarantees no step is skipped.
18. Tracking holidays and absences. Approving a holiday request and reflecting it on the rota by hand creates gaps. Automatic approval and rota update prevent them.
19. Consolidated activity reports. Pulling data scattered across several tools (spreadsheet, business software, email) by hand to produce a report takes time out of all proportion to how often it is read. Automatic consolidation removes the collecting.
20. Filing documents. Filing email attachments (invoices, contracts, receipts) into the right folders by hand is background work that is never urgent, so it is rarely done properly. Automatic filing, by rules or by AI, keeps the archive current without anyone thinking about it.

Read next

• Audit your processes before you automate — why the choice of task matters more than the choice of tool.
• Working out the ROI of an automation — what the task you pick is really worth.
• Take a look at your processes — thirty minutes, no obligation.