Top 25 Business Tasks You Should Automate to Save Time and Money

How many hours does your team spend doing things they know don’t move the business forward?

Inputting the same data. Sending the same emails. Running the same reports. Again. And again. And again.

Now imagine a workday where those tasks just... disappear. Not because they stopped being necessary—but because software handled them faster, better, and more reliably than any person ever could.

We live in a time where something that sounded like science fiction just a decade ago, is swiftly becoming standard practice in modern businesses. It's called business process automation. And in today’s world —where speed, accuracy, and efficiency is of the essence—it's a surefire way to get ahead. 

So if you're wondering where automation actually makes a difference, grab a coffee and let’s break down 25 high-impact ways you can use it to transform your productivity, boost your bottom line, and supercharge your team.

1. Cut Costs Without Cutting Corners

Time is money—and every time your team performs a task that automation could easily have taken off their hands, you’re burning both. 

Manual tasks are a drag on your productivity. Every time someone enters customer data, schedules an email, files a report, or moves info from one system to another, it costs you money. 

Automation slashes the time spent on routine tasks, freeing up both budget and bandwidth. And time spent on routine tasks could have been used to build your company, make a strategic move, or make a customer happy.

So when you automate routine tasks, you're creating space for your team to work on stuff that actually matters—you’re freeing them up to focus on things that move the business forward.

2. Save Time

Automated systems perform tasks in seconds that take humans minutes (or hours). And when you automate a task—even a small one—you don’t just save time once. You save time every time an employee has to perform that task. That adds up fast.

When your entire team is able to shave hours off their week with little process tweaks, you’re not just freeing up time—you’re unlocking scale. You’re giving them time to think, time to plan, time to implement the big stuff that moves your business forward.

3. Multiply Your Productivity

At a certain point, every business hits a wall. Not because demand dries up, but because your team reaches the capacity of what they can accomplish in a set period of time.

Which means that it's basically impossible to grow a business with the same headcount—that is, unless you take automation into account. Automation gives you the ability to achieve a whole lot more with the amazing team you already have.

By letting machines take the repetitive load, your existing team can handle a higher volume of work without burning out. It's the old adage of learning to work smarter, not harder. 

Automation fuels growth without swelling your payroll. You get more throughput, more responsiveness, more output—without expensing a major expansion of your team.  

4. Optimise Your Performance 

You’ve probably got some rockstar team members—the ones who show up, knock out tasks, keep things moving. But even the best people can only go so fast when they’re chained to slow, clunky, manual systems.

If you really want to optimize your business performance, it’s not just about motivating people—it’s about removing friction. That’s where automation comes in. It doesn’t just help your people move faster—it removes the drag entirely.

You’ll get systems that run smoother and teams that work smarter. Your top talent gets to focus on high-value tasks while machines handle the grunt work. It’s a win for morale and results.

5. Deliver Legendary Customer Service

Every business says they care about customer service. But when things get busy, who’s really picking up that phone on the third ring? Who’s answering the weekend emails? Who’s following up on that missed order that fell through the cracks?

Automation fills in all those gaps in your customer experience strategy. From instant order confirmations to 24/7 support chatbots, automated customer service doesn’t sleep. It delivers fast answers and smooth experiences without ever losing its cool.

In short—if you want to blow your customers’ socks off without blowing your budget or burning out your team… automation is the answer.

6. Become Available 24/7

Customers aren't always reasonable and they expect you to be on call 24 hours a day. They want to book, check, order, ask, browse, follow up, and even file a complaint at the time that works for them.

Automation allows you to become available to your customers all the time—even when you’re away from your desk or doing something like sleeping or watching your kid's rugby game.

With automation, customers can book appointments, place orders, or find answers to common questions any time of day. Meanwhile, your internal processes (like inventory checks or report generation) can keep humming along even after you’ve clocked out.

Think about how many hours your front desk, support staff, or admin crew spends on simple, repetitive interactions with customers. These tasks can and should be handled by automation. Give your team back their time, and give your customers the satisfaction of instant answers.

You’ll win points for responsiveness, reduce customer complaints, and keep your operation humming even when you’re offline.

7. Boost your Reliability Score 

Customers hate inconsistency. What they love is reliability, because reliability matters in every corner of your business:

• Processing refunds on time
• Sending customer confirmations
• Generating end-of-day reports
• Tracking inventory thresholds
• Rotating marketing campaigns
• Reordering supplies when stock is low

Every single one of those tasks can and should be automated. Automation creates reliability by ensuring key processes happen exactly the same way every time. And reliability builds trust—both with your customers and your team.

8. Eliminate Repetitive Errors

No business is free from those small, daily missteps that quietly drain time, money, and trust from your organisation. Even the best, most well-meaning employee will eventually make a mistake. That's part of being human. 

Automating repetitive tasks dramatically reduces the opportunity for error. In fact, every time you remove a recurring task from a human’s plate, you reduce the chance of an error by 100%.

Billing? Data entry? Payroll? Let automation carry the brunt of the work and eliminate the opportunity for those pesky errors to creep in. 

9. Keep Quality Consistent

Inconsistency is the enemy of any business. The fact is that when you assign repetitive tasks to people, output quality usually varies—sometimes by a lot.

Automation ensures consistency. Whether it’s assembling products, formatting deliverables, sending customer emails, or reviewing data—if you can document the steps, you can automate the steps. And once you do, every output is just as precise as the one before it. 

Let automation handle the rinse-and-repeat tasks that make or break quality—and let your team focus on what can’t be automated: the human interaction, the creative spark, the high-level thinking.

10. Gain Metric Visibility

As a business owner or manager, you need quality, up-to-date data to make decisions. Which is why automation is such a productivity boost for effective management.

Automated reporting lets you track what’s actually happening in your business without waiting for someone to compile a spreadsheet. You get dashboards, daily emails, and alerts that help you act fast—not after it’s too late.

With the right automation tools, your business metrics can become visible, accurate, and timely—without you lifting a finger. Which means you get to base your decisions on solid, actionable data, instead of feelings and hunches.

11. Boost Employee Morale

Want to make your team happier? Stop giving them mind-numbing tasks that take up half their day to accomplish. Nothing crushes employee morale faster than being treated like a robot.

When automation handles the boring stuff, employees get to do more creative, strategic work. That doesn’t just boost morale—it builds loyalty, innovation, and pride in the work they do.

12. Run More Efficiently 

No manager wants to run a business like a bloated, disorganised mess. When it comes to boosting output while cutting cost, efficiency is the name of the game. 

But operational efficiency is just a fancy way of saying that you want to get more done with less friction. It's not just about doing the same amount of work faster, but also about doing the work accurately and reliably.

This is where automation shines. Automation helps you move faster and smoother without being bogged down by quality control. With the right automation, your team won't just be moving faster—they'll be moving smarter. 

13. Enforce Governance and Compliance

When tasks are automated, compliance becomes incredibly simple. This is because every automated task is tracked, timestamped, and documented. 

Need to show who did what and when? Automation keeps all the receipts—and makes them instantly available when you want to run a report.

The result is better compliance, easier audits, and a much simpler process to track the chain of responsibility for a specific task or project. 

14. Increase Predictability 

Good managers strive to achieve predictable results, achieved from predictable timelines, using repeatable processes. Predictability allows you to plan with confidence.

Any process that's automated automatically becomes repeatable and predictable. The process will follow the same logic and steps every time it's executed. That predictability means better planning, better outcomes, and fewer surprises.

15. Streamline Hiring & Training

Automation is highly suitable for handling repetitive tasks in your human resources department. Hiring systems can screen resumes, schedule interviews, and even deliver onboarding training automatically and without a hitch.

So instead of wasting hours reading through applications or scheduling calls, your team can focus on making the right hire—and getting them productive faster.

16. Deliver a Consistent Customer Experience

Whether a customer interacts with you on Monday or Friday, automation helps deliver a consistent experience—every time.

For example, you could set up automated email or chat responses that confirm receipt, answer common questions, and set expectations for response time.

What's more, automation tools can populate names, order details, timelines—all dynamically—so every customer feels like they’re getting the VIP treatment, even when it's 90% automated.

The result is that every customer gets the same quality of service—no matter who they talk to, or when. Automation will also free up more of your team's time to handle more unusual customer interactions.

17. Automate Payroll

Payroll mistakes are costly and really annoying to fix. With automation, hours get logged, taxes get calculated, and paychecks go out—on time and error-free. 

You also reduce the headcount needed just to run payroll. What used to take three people and four days? Can now be handled by one person… maybe in one hour. Your finance team (and your employees) will thank you.

18. Speed Up Accounts Payable

Paying bills shouldn’t take a team of accountants three days to accomplish. Also, when your business relies on manual payment processes, it's easy to forget paying a bill or getting crucial payment details wrong.

With automated A/P systems, you can turn the grind of paying everyone on time into a smooth, trackable, low-maintenance system that does 95% of the work for you.

The system can automatically sort, schedule, and send payments on time—cutting manual workload and eliminating those awkward late fees. Which means you save massive amounts of time while reducing human error dramatically.

19. Accelerate Accounts Receivable

Accounts receivable (A/R) is where so many businesses leave money on the table—not because the revenue isn’t there, but because the process to collect it is clunky, inconsistent, or awkward.

Automation can follow up on unpaid invoices, post digital payments, and handle check scanning with minimal effort. More cash in your account, less chasing clients.

Getting paid faster? Yes please.

20. Eliminate Data Entry Nightmares

Data entry should be a no-brainer when it comes to automation because almost every part of this process can be automated. 

For example, with the right automation, your system can read incoming order emails, extract the relevant data, and enter it into your order system automatically. 

Orders can then be auto-assigned to the correct department, fulfilment team, or location—based on order type, region, or inventory levels. Order data then flows seamlessly from CRM to fulfilment to invoicing without anyone touching a single spreadsheet.

So if your team is still manually keying in orders, double-checking addresses, and flipping between four systems to confirm a sale—it's time to take a serious look at automating your data entry processes.

21. Track Commissions with Zero Headaches

Have you ever delayed a commission payout because someone needed to "double-check the numbers"? If you pay sales commissions, you know how messy it can get.

Automation lets you track deals, calculate percentages, and trigger payouts without spreadsheets or unnecessary delays.

22. Let Customers Order from Their Phones

Self-service is the future. So it's worthwhile looking at ways to implement automatic mobile phone ordering for your customers. 

Which means that your customers can now log into your app or mobile site, place their own orders, and it goes straight into your system. The second they place the order, they get a receipt, estimated delivery time, and a thank-you message—all automated. From there the order flows directly to the appropriate warehouse, distributor, or team based on rules you’ve set in the background.

23. Reconcile Transactions Faster

Cash-intensive businesses spend dozens of hours reconciling sales. With the right automation in place, your point-of-sale (POS), payment processors, and accounting software will all talk to each other.

Which means the system can automatically match payments, log all transactions, and flag any  discrepancies—cutting days spent hunting down errors into hours and preventing costly mistakes.

24. Automate Reports & Workflows

Automation is the only way to keep track of the flood of information that flows in and out of your business on a daily basis. Software can now keep track of all this valuable data and turn them into real time reports on sales, inventory, churn, conversion rates, and other insights that you can use to track and manage your business.

Want a daily sales report in your inbox at 8:00 AM? Done. Want customer service tickets automatically routed to the right team? Easy. Automation keeps everyone informed and aligned, without lifting a finger.

25. Connect All Your Systems 

You shouldn’t have to juggle five different apps to complete one process. Automation integrates your tools—from CRMs to ERPs to marketing platforms—so your data flows freely, and your workflows run like clockwork. 

Conclusion

Whether you're just starting out, scaling your operations, or managing a legacy business that needs a tech refresh, automation offers a way to take your productivity to the next level.

Too many smart, driven business leaders are stuck, not because of a lack of ideas or motivation, but because their daily routine has become bogged down in manual processes, outdated workflows, and repetitive tasks. 

Business process automation empowers you to do more with less, move faster with fewer mistakes—all while delivering consistent, world-class results.

The business case for process automation is clear. And with the advent of software as a service of, process automation is no longer reserved for the biggest players in the market, either. 

Are manual processes holding your business back from reaching true greatness? Then it's time that you take a serious look at process automation. Because the future of your business isn’t in doing more—it’s in working smarter.