Hire an administrator or automate part of the work?

Recruiting for an administrative or coordinator role takes time and money: advertising, interviews, onboarding and the weeks while the seat is empty.

Local salary levels and the difficulty of finding candidates both affect that cost. Use current figures for the specific role. An average across all workers in a city does not tell you what an administrator costs.

Your own records are a useful guide too: how long your last hire took, what it cost and how long the new person took to settle in.

The tasks worth assessing repeat with a consistent shape: a clear input, a clear output and a rule you could write down. The results below come from individual Reformat Labs projects. Each one measures a single task in one business.

• First-pass contract review at a law firm fell from an average of 72 minutes to 11, about 85% less time.
• A trade business prepares quotes in 20 minutes, compared with half a day previously.
• First response to enquiries went from 4 hours to under 90 seconds.
• An estate agency handled 22% more viewings without adding headcount.
• A financial services firm cut client review preparation time by about two-thirds.
• A retailer's campaign output tripled with the same team.

Work that changes each time, or depends on judgement and relationships, stays with a person. Looking at the tasks one by one shows which side each one falls on.

Start with the role. List the tasks it would cover in a normal week and mark the ones that repeat in a consistent way.

For those tasks, work out what automating them would involve: the systems it would connect to, who would check the output and what it would cost to build and run.

The tasks that remain show what the role still needs. That may be the role as planned, a different role, or a hire now with automation considered later.

We can work through this with you using your own figures. The decision about the role, and how it is staffed, stays with you.

Public funding for technology adoption is sometimes available to West of England businesses, through regional programmes that offer advice, workshops or grants. Programmes, eligibility and amounts change, so check what is open with the programme provider before you plan around it.

Funded advice and a build are separate pieces of work. If you have had funded advice, we can scope a build that follows from it.

Manufacturers should also check for manufacturing-specific programmes, which set their own eligibility rules.