Business automation services for UK small businesses.
Most automation projects fail because somebody picked a tool before understanding the process. We start the other way round: work out what actually happens, decide whether software is even the right answer, then build the specific thing that fixes it.
Fixed price. Roughly four weeks. You own the code.
Autaimate provides business automation services for UK small and medium businesses, replacing manual processes with software built for the specific job rather than a generic platform. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. The client owns the code.
What business automation actually means
The term has been stretched until it covers almost anything with software in it. The useful definition is narrower: business automation is replacing a repetitive, rules-based task that currently depends on a person, with software that does the same job reliably and without anyone retyping information between systems.
That covers less than the marketing suggests and more than most owners expect. It does not cover the parts of the job that need judgement, negotiation or a relationship — those are worth protecting rather than replacing. It does cover the layer underneath: the retyping, the chasing, the writing-up, the remembering to file something.
Whether it is worth doing comes down to three questions. How many hours a week does the process consume? How often does it go wrong? What does a mistake cost when it does? A task that takes twenty minutes a week and fails harmlessly is not worth automating. A task that eats a day a week, or where a mistake means a failed audit, usually is.
The processes that keep coming up
These are the six problems UK businesses bring to us most often. If you recognise two or more of them, there is probably a build worth scoping.
The same information typed three times
It arrives by email, gets typed into a spreadsheet, then typed again into the invoice. Nobody planned it that way — it grew. Every retype is a chance to get a number wrong, and the person doing it is usually the person you can least afford to have doing it.
A day a week lost to paperwork
Certificates, reports, quotes, compliance records. The work itself takes an hour; writing it up takes the evening. It is the most common thing UK small businesses ask us to fix, and the one that costs the most before anybody measures it.
Enquiries that go unanswered
The phone rings while you are up a ladder. The website form goes to an inbox nobody checks until Friday. By then the customer has called somebody else. In most trades the first to reply wins the work.
Compliance held together by memory
The regulation is clear enough. What is not clear is whether the record proving you followed it still exists, who signed it, and where it is filed. When the audit comes, that gap costs more than the work did.
A spreadsheet everybody is scared of
One person built it. It works. Nobody else fully understands it, and nobody wants to touch it in case it breaks. That is not a spreadsheet problem — that is a piece of business logic with no owner.
Software that fits somebody else’s business
Generic platforms flatten every industry into the same workflows. You end up bending how you work to fit the tool, paying per seat for features you will never open, and still keeping the real record in a spreadsheet on the side.
How we approach it
Four principles. They are the reason our builds ship in four weeks rather than four months, and the reason we occasionally talk clients out of the project entirely.
We start with the job, not the software
The first conversation is about what actually happens — who touches the work, how often, where it stalls, what the workaround is. Most automation projects fail because somebody picked a tool before they understood the process. We scope the process first and only then decide what gets built.
We tell you when not to build
If a one-off workflow quirk can be solved with a better spreadsheet or a change to how the work is passed around, we will say so. Software that automates a broken process just makes the wrong thing happen faster. We would rather lose the commission than sell you something that does not earn its keep.
Fixed scope, fixed price, before anything starts
The price is agreed up front and does not move. No hourly meter, no change requests that quietly double the bill. That discipline is what keeps a four-week build a four-week build rather than a four-month one — it forces both sides to decide what actually matters before a line of code is written.
You own what gets built
When the build ships, the code is yours. No licence we can revoke, no platform lock-in, no hostage data. You can keep it private, hand it to another developer, or turn it into a product you sell to your own industry. That decision belongs to you, not us.
What automation looks like in practice
Five kinds of build, each with something live you can go and look at.
Calculators and costing tools
Standards-compliant calculation built to the actual regulations rather than generic maths dressed up. Cable sizing, voltage drop and circuit design to BS 7671; plant hire costing; job pricing. Fast, free to use, and built so the right customers find you through them.
tradecalcs.co.uk — 50+ BS 7671 calculators, live and ranking.
Inspection and reporting apps
Voice-first apps that turn a site visit into a finished, standards-referenced PDF before you leave. Speak the findings on site; the report writes itself. Fully offline, so a dropped signal on a rural job never costs you the day.
inspectvoice.co.uk — offline-first BS EN 1176 playground inspections.
Front-of-house and enquiry handling
An assistant that greets every website visitor, scopes the job in around thirty seconds and captures the enquiry with a name and a number, texted to your phone the moment it lands. It answers only from your own material and the answers you have confirmed, so it cannot make things up.
foredesk.co.uk — live for its first customers.
Platforms and portals
When the job needs the whole thing — logins, dashboards, admin, reporting, multiple customers each with their own branded view — we build complete multi-tenant platforms to a premium engineering standard. Proper tenant isolation, built to feel finished rather than prototyped.
towninsider.co.uk — multi-tenant, per-customer branded builds.
Bespoke AI systems
When off-the-shelf will not cut it: a system that knows your product inside out, qualifies the lead, takes the sale and books the customer onto training or events — all in one conversation, all running itself, all grounded in your own material so it cannot invent specifications or pricing.
Currently in build for a UK manufacturer.
Who this is for
UK small and medium businesses in construction, trades, property, care, hospitality, inspection and other regulated or underserved industries. Businesses where the software that exists was clearly built for somebody else, and where the real record still lives in a spreadsheet regardless of what platform is being paid for.
Autaimate is a one-person product studio. Mick Stevenson spent four decades in UK construction and trades before writing any software. That matters for a specific reason: the failure mode in this work is a developer who has never done the job designing a tool for people who do it every day. Knowing what a site looks like at seven in the morning in January, and what paperwork an inspection actually generates, is why our builds get used rather than opened twice and abandoned.
It also means you get told when a build is not the answer. A studio that only makes money by building has an obvious incentive to say yes. We would rather have the reputation.
Frequently asked questions
What are business automation services? +
Business automation means replacing a manual, repetitive process with software that does the same job reliably and without a person retyping things. In practice that covers everything from a calculator that removes a spreadsheet, to an app that produces a compliance report on site, to a system that captures and chases every enquiry. The useful definition is narrower than the marketing one: if a person is doing something a computer could do more accurately, that is the candidate.
How much does business automation cost for a UK small business? +
Autaimate commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500. The scoping session is where the job gets defined properly — you get a written scope out of it whether or not you go ahead with the build. Fixed price means the number agreed at the start is the number you pay, with no hourly meter running.
How long does a business automation project take? +
Typically about four weeks from kick-off to a live, working product. Some builds are shorter. Larger scopes take longer. Four weeks is the rhythm we design to deliberately — it is long enough to build something properly and short enough to force honest decisions about what actually matters.
Is automation worth it for a small business, or only for large companies? +
The economics usually favour small businesses more, not less. A firm of five people where one person loses a day a week to paperwork is losing four per cent of its capacity to admin. That is a bigger proportional hit than the same problem in a company of five hundred, and there is no operations department to absorb it. The reason small businesses automate less is not that it is worth less — it is that most software is priced and shaped for enterprises.
What can actually be automated in a small business? +
The reliable candidates share a shape: the task is repetitive, follows rules that can be written down, and currently depends on a person remembering to do it. Report writing, quoting and costing, compliance record-keeping, enquiry capture and follow-up, and any process where the same information is entered into more than one system. The poor candidates are the ones needing judgement, negotiation or a relationship — those are worth protecting, not replacing.
Will automation replace my staff? +
It removes the part of the job nobody wanted. In every build we have shipped, the automation handles the repetitive layer and the person handles the work that needed a person in the first place. The realistic outcome is that the same team takes on more work without more admin, not that the team shrinks.
What is the difference between business automation and buying off-the-shelf software? +
Off-the-shelf software is the right answer more often than a bespoke shop will admit — if a product already does the job, buy it. Commissioning makes sense when the process is specific to your industry or your business, when the generic tool would force you to change how you work, or when the thing you need does not exist. The honest test: if you are already paying for a platform and still keeping the real record in a spreadsheet on the side, the platform is not fitting.
Do I own the software after it is built? +
Yes. The code and the product are yours when the build ships. No licence we can revoke, no platform dependency. You decide what happens next — keep it private, hand it to another developer, or expand it into a product you sell to your own industry.
What technology do you build on? +
React 18 with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS on the front end, Cloudflare Workers at the edge, PostgreSQL with row-level security for data, Clerk for authentication, and Stripe for payments. Chosen because they are stable, well documented and maintainable by any competent developer — not because they are fashionable. You are never dependent on us to keep it running.
How do you handle GDPR and data security? +
It is built in from the first commit rather than bolted on. Encryption at rest for special-category data, row-level security on every tenant table, audit logging on every state-changing operation, signed URLs for file storage, and uniform responses on delete endpoints so records cannot be enumerated. UK data residency is available on request for regulated sectors.
What happens if I need changes after the build? +
You own the code, so you are free to take it to any developer. Most clients come back to us because we know the system, but that is a choice rather than a dependency. We quote changes the same way we quote builds — scoped and fixed price.
How do I know whether my process is worth automating? +
Rough test: how many hours a week does it consume, how often does it go wrong, and what does a mistake cost when it does? If it is under an hour a week and mistakes are cheap, leave it alone. If it is a day a week, or a mistake means a failed audit or a lost customer, it is worth a conversation. The scoping session exists to answer this properly, and it is the point at which we will tell you if the answer is no.
Got a process that is costing you a day a week?
Tell us what it is and we will tell you straight whether it is worth building something for. If it is not, you will hear that too.