Readiness & Cost Checklist

What's All That Manual Work Costing You?

Six steps, about ten minutes, and it runs on your numbers rather than ours. You tick the jobs your team repeats, put honest hours against them, and you'll see two figures: what staying as you are costs every year, and roughly what changing it costs once.

Most owners already know which job is eating the week. What's harder to say is what it costs over a year, and whether it is the sort of work software should be doing at all. This checklist answers both. It'll tell you the answer is no when that's the honest answer, and for some industries that's what it says by default.

It also splits your work into two piles, which is the part most tools skip. Some jobs happen out of sight: re-typing the same order into a second system, chasing a supplier for the third time. Software can take those. Other jobs only exist because your website won't do them, so a person answers the phone instead. When a salon spends its day taking bookings by text, the missing booking page is the actual problem. You don't have to work out which is which. Tick what you actually do and the checklist sorts it.

None of it is a quote. The yearly figure is built from your answers. The one-off figure comes from the price ranges we publish, and only a real conversation can price your situation.

Everything below is editable. The estimate updates as you type.

How the Sorting Works

The Two Kinds of Work

Every job in the checklist sits in one of these two piles, and which pile it lands in decides what you are shown at the end. One question sorts almost everything: if you closed for a week, would this work be waiting when you got back, or would it have gone to a competitor?

Desk task

Work nobody outside your business ever sees

Your customers have no idea this work happens. It exists because two systems won't talk to each other, or because the only copy of the procedure is in somebody's head. Hand it to software and the cost goes away. Nobody outside your business notices a thing.

How to spot it: close for a week and it would be sitting there waiting when you get back.

Its check: the wrong-answer test. Is the job the same shape every time? Could somebody tell you how they would spot a bad result? Could a bad result reach a customer before anyone noticed? Fail any one of those and the job is out, however much it's costing you.

Re-keying orders between systems. Rebuilding the same report. Chasing suppliers. Compliance filing prep.

Front-door task

Work your customer would do online

Here a person is doing a website's job. It costs you twice: once in wages, and again in the work that never arrived because nobody was there to take it. The call after closing. The message nobody saw until Monday. The booking that went to whoever answered first.

How to spot it: close for a week and this work goes to a competitor instead.

Its check: the self-serve test. Would your customer actually do it themselves? Bookings, orders and the same three questions every day, yes. A quote that needs negotiating, no. And is anyone already trying to do it online? If nobody is asking, building it is a guess.

Bookings by phone and message. The same product question answered again. Re-typing web leads. "Are you open Sunday?"

Website Development

Where a New Website Comes In

The website service is not bolted on at the end of this checklist. It is live from the first step, because front-door tasks are tagged there and priced in the same hours as everything else.

StarterPresence, hours, directions, click to call. Stops the after-hours leak.Scoped in a conversation, not from a rate card

GrowthThe site does the intake: booking, forms, and the product questions answered once instead of forty times.Scoped in a conversation, not from a rate card

ProThe website as a business system. Capture flows into your CRM and pipeline, with automation behind it.Scoped in a conversation, not from a rate card

Full detail on the three tiers is on the website development page.

Not ready, or nothing qualifiedThe named blocker and what leaving it costs you, or the plain fact that none of this work should be handed over yet. No sale either way.

Desk work onlyAn automation conversation. Sometimes a job you can do yourself, and it will tell you that too.

Front-door onlyA website conversation. The automation can wait.

BothOne build rather than two projects: the site is the intake, the automation is the back end.

Above the line: free, self-serve, a rough estimate Below the line: paid, validated, quoted

AI Readiness AssessmentWorkflow and data audit, opportunity scoring, and a written report. The fee credits toward implementation.

Website discovery callYour sheet arrives as the answer to "what should the site do", with the hours and dollars already on it.

Methodology

How We Work the Numbers Out

Two figures, worked out two different ways. The cost of staying as you are comes from your own answers, so it's as precise as they are. The cost of changing it comes from the price ranges we publish, which is why that one stays a range.

What staying costs

Times per week x minutes ÷ 60 x 4.33 weeks gives hours per month. Hours x rate x 12 gives the year. Owner time is priced at the owner rate, not the staff rate.

What the check removes

Only jobs that pass their test stay in the qualified figure. That is why the number goes down at step 4, and why it splits into desk work and front-door work at the same moment.

What changing costs

One to three qualified desk tasks is a pilot, $5,000 – $15,000 on clean answers. Four or more is an implementation, from $12,500. Each unmet readiness item that bears on the desk work raises the band by 15%, up to the published ceilings of $18,000 and $75,000. The front-door readiness item holds the recommendation shut without moving that price, since it is not a back-office cost.

Bands are the published ranges on our AI consulting cost page. Breakeven is the one time cost divided by the monthly value of the desk work, and is shown for the automation side only. The website side names a tier and shows no dollars, because website investment comes out of a conversation rather than a rate card. Want the payback modelled across three years instead? Use the ROI calculator.