Why now, and when not at all

The gap is the point

These are Dutch figures, and they are labelled as such — but the pattern is not unique to the Netherlands. Large companies have largely arranged their administrative processes: two thirds use AI technology. Among smaller companies it is under a third, and below ten staff under a seventh. That difference does not come from smaller companies needing it less, but from nobody being around to build it.

At the same time the labour market is tight in almost every occupational group, and administrative and secretarial roles are precisely the ones being automated further. For an owner that means two things at once: that capacity cannot be hired in, and it does not have to be — provided someone sets it up.

When it does not pay off

Automation has a fixed cost side: building costs money, and maintenance costs money every month. Below a certain volume that maintenance costs more than the manual work it replaces. That is not an edge case but a common outcome.

Rule of thumb: below roughly ten hours of manual work a month on a single process, automating rarely pays off; from around twenty it becomes clearly interesting. Count in hours, not in items — fifty invoices of a quarter of an hour weigh more than five hundred order lines of ten seconds. If you are below that, a better way of working or an extra pair of hands is often wiser, and we will say so.

Why the analysis costs money

The first conversation is free. But the real investigation — walking through your process, counting and calculating — costs money, and that is a deliberate choice.

Everyone in this market offers a free scan. A free scan has to earn itself back from the job that follows, which is why the conclusion is usually written in advance. You get a list of opportunities that happens to match what that firm likes to build.

Because we are paid for the investigation, we can also say no. We can advise leaving two of three processes exactly as they are, or conclude that your volume is too low. That advice is then worth just as much as advice to build.

An Automation Check costs €295 and covers one process. An Automation Scan costs €595 and weighs up to three against each other. If you have us build within thirty days we deduct the Check in full — so you only pay for it if the answer is no, or if you do nothing with it.

Straight to the person who builds it

You speak to the person who also builds. No handover from salesperson to consultant to developer, losing what was actually agreed along the way. Analysis, design and implementation sit with the same technically responsible person.

It also means we do not have unlimited capacity. We work on a maximum of four implementations at a time. If it fills up, you hear that and we schedule later rather than squeezing you in.

For continuity the setup is aimed at leaving you tied to nothing: everything runs by default in your own environment on your own licences, workflows are documented, and access credentials are kept separately. If the relationship falls away, another party can take it over without starting again. How that is set up →