If your business processes aren't boring, they are expensive
If Your Business Processes Aren’t Boring, They’re Expensive
We’ve all worked in places where certain processes are either a pain or overly complicated. You may even have a few long-time employees who are the only ones who know how to do those tasks. But here’s the thing—complexity often adds unnecessary costs. The more complicated a process, the more time, resources, and risk it involves.
Why Complicated Processes Are Costly
When processes require specialised skills or specific people, you’re adding more time and money to your operations. You also increase the risk of delays if someone is unavailable or if important knowledge is lost.
To reduce these costs, the goal should be to make your processes as simple (and yes, boring) as possible. Here’s how you can do it: break everything down into the smallest possible steps and look for ways to streamline or automate.
The Example: Breaking Down Expenses
Let’s use the example of recording expenses.
In many companies, there’s an accountant who needs data and a bookkeeper who spends time chasing everyone for receipts. Cards are used, direct debits happen, and receipts are scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, or even trays on desks. If you break that down into the smallest steps, it looks like this:
- Spending money and receiving a receipt (whether digital, paper, or no receipt).
- Categorising receipts and expenses, which might be stored in:
- Spreadsheets
- Email inboxes
- Physical trays or desks
- The bookkeeper collects and categorises everything, ensuring nothing is missing.
- The accountant reviews everything, ensuring the process is complete at the end of a financial quarter.
By breaking this process down, you can simplify it. For example, you can set up automations that collect receipts and match them with transactions, eliminating a large chunk of manual work.
How Automation Saves Time
Personally, I’ve set up automations to handle many of these steps for my business. When I make purchases, I use a business card and ensure receipts are emailed to an account connected to my accounting software. The software scans the receipts and matches them with transactions.
I’ve also created rules in my email that automatically categorise emails with the words “receipt,” “invoice,” or “purchase” as expenses. For recurring expenses like iCloud (which doesn’t send a PDF), I built an automation that exports those emails as PDFs and sends them to my accounting software.
It took a few hours to set up, but now I save 20–30 minutes a month on this process alone. Small automations like this can add up to significant savings.
Can AI Simplify Everything?
You might wonder if AI can handle even more of these processes. While AI can reduce time and cost, there’s an element of risk involved. You won’t always know exactly how the AI is handling the data, which can create technical debt for larger organisations. For smaller, low-risk tasks, AI might be helpful, but it’s essential to monitor how it fits into your processes.
Ultimately, if you simply gave a LLM the whole problem to solve in a single prompt, it’s first step would be to break down the process into smaller steps to tackle - just as I have suggested you should.
Simplifying Processes to Save Costs
If a process feels complicated, it’s probably costing you more than it should. Here’s a simple three-step method to streamline your operations:
- Document each process.
- Break it down into the smallest steps.
- Optimise by automating where possible and eliminating unnecessary steps.
By simplifying processes, you’ll reduce costs, save time, and avoid the risks associated with complexity. Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it should continue that way.
If you have any thoughts on this or examples of a process that you believe is truly complicated and can’t be simplified, I’d love to hear them. I’m happy to be challenged!
