Free tool

What should you automate first?

Nine questions about how your week actually runs. Out comes the three jobs worth doing first, in order, with the hours each one gives back and a plain description of what the fixed version looks like. Nothing you answer leaves your browser.

Your week

  1. 1

    What kind of business is it?

  2. 2

    How many enquiries reach you in a typical week?

    Calls, messages, forms and walk-ins together. A rough count is fine.

  3. 3

    How many of those wait more than an hour for a real reply?

  4. 4

    Where do they arrive?

    Tick everything that gets used.

  5. 5

    What normally has to happen after the first reply?

  6. 6

    Who chases the ones that go quiet?

  7. 7

    How do appointments get booked and reminded?

  8. 8

    How much of the week goes on typing the same information into more than one place?

  9. 9

    How often do past customers hear from you?

Answer all nine and the result appears here. Nothing is sent anywhere.

How the ranking works

There are seven categories of work in a small business, and almost every automation project is one of them. The scanner estimates how many hours a month each one is currently costing you, then orders them.

  1. Answering and capturing every enquiry. The calls, messages and forms that get picked up late or not at all.
  2. Chasing the ones that go quiet. Quotes, trials and conversations that stop, and the follow-up that depends on somebody remembering.
  3. Booking, reminders and no-shows. Getting people into the diary and keeping them there.
  4. Intake, quoting and documents. Collecting what a real answer needs, and reading the documents that arrive instead of retyping them.
  5. Records, invoicing and re-typing. The same information entered into more than one place.
  6. Repeat business and reviews. The customers you already have, contacted on a cycle rather than on a whim.
  7. Knowing your numbers without asking. Reporting that arrives rather than being assembled.

The two things it does are honest and separate. It measures hours from the volumes you enter, using factors it prints on screen. Then it weights those hours by industry, because the same number of hours is not worth the same everywhere: a dead chair in a salon and a slow quote in manufacturing are different kinds of problem.

The honest framing, same as every other tool we publish: this estimates the size of a job, not a promise. It is built so you can argue with the arithmetic rather than trust a headline.

What to do with the answer

Build the first one only. Every automation project that fails does so by trying to do all seven at once, and the first one is what proves whether any of this is worth continuing.

The staged version of that argument, three phases over three months, is in the ninety day roadmap. If you would rather see what the whole operating system looks like before choosing a piece of it, that is the back office blueprint.

Not sure your industry page exists yet? The industries hub lists the ones written so far, and the four problems underneath them are the same everywhere.

The companion guide

Where the hours actually go, and how to find out in a week

Where this applies

AI systems for contractors and trades who are on a roof when the phone rings

AI systems for shops that do not have a website problem, they have a phone problem

AI systems for firms whose most expensive people spend their day on admin

Scanner FAQ

What does the scanner actually do?
It scores seven categories of work against your own answers, weights them by what tends to matter most in your industry, and returns the top three in order. The hours come from the volumes you enter multiplied by per-unit factors that are printed on screen next to the result.
Where do the hours come from?
Your numbers are yours: the enquiry volume, the share that waits, the hours you lose to re-typing. The conversion factors are ours, for example six minutes to pick a missed enquiry back up and eight minutes to write one follow-up by hand. All of them are listed under the result so you can disagree with any of them.
Why does it not tell me what this is worth in money?
Because it would have to guess at your close rate, your margin and your deal size, and stacking three guesses produces a confident number that means nothing. Hours are something you can check against your own week. If you want the revenue version of one specific argument, the speed-to-lead calculator does that with published research and stated caps.
Is the order just the biggest number first?
No. The hours are weighted by industry, which is why a salon and a manufacturer with identical answers get different orders. Booking is worth more than the raw hours suggest in a salon; intake and document handling are worth more in manufacturing.
My industry is not in the list.
Pick the closest one. The seven categories of work are the same everywhere, and the industry weighting shifts the order rather than changing what gets measured. The result will still be usable.
Does anything I enter get sent to you?
No. There is no form, no submit button and no backend. The whole thing runs in your browser. We record an anonymous event saying a scan was completed, with none of your answers attached.
The third item says it is already handled. Is that a bug?
No, that is the tool working. If you already automate booking, the hours there are near zero and it correctly tells you so. A ranking that always finds three urgent problems would not be a ranking.