Step 1: Workflow Inventory
Before we recommend anything, we have to know what we're actually looking at. The inventory step is where you describe the manual processes that are eating your team's time, and we summarize each one back to confirm we understood it correctly. No tools to install. No integrations to set up. Just a careful conversation.
What we look for
We're trying to identify three things about each workflow you describe. First: how the work actually happens in practice, not how it's described in a process document. The two are usually different. Second: how stable the workflow is — has it changed in the last quarter, will it change in the next quarter, are people in the role about to turn over? Third: where the exceptions live. Most workflows have a clean happy path and a messy edge-case path that nobody mentions until you ask.
We pay specific attention to anything described in passive voice ('the data gets sent over to...'). Passive voice usually means the speaker doesn't know who or what does the step, which often means the step is a hidden manual handoff. Those handoffs are usually the biggest automation opportunities — and the easiest to miss in a casual conversation.
Common mistakes at this stage
Describing the workflow at too high a level. 'We handle support tickets' is not a workflow description; it's a category. A workflow description sounds like: 'When a customer emails support@, the email lands in Front, a support rep reads it and assigns it to the right person based on a Notion routing doc, that person responds within 4 hours during business hours, and copies the response into Salesforce for the contact record.' The first version cannot be audited. The second can.
Skipping workflows that feel 'too small.' If a task happens 30 times a week and takes 4 minutes each time, that's 100 hours per year — well worth automating if it's reliable. Small-and-frequent often beats big-and-rare, but it's invisible in a high-level description.
Listing only the workflows you've already decided are worth automating. The most valuable parts of an audit are the workflows we recommend you don't automate yet. Filtering before the inventory means missing those.
What this step looks like in practice
When you submit the form, you'll have a free-text field to describe your bottlenecks. Aim for a couple of paragraphs per workflow, not a single sentence and not a wall of text. After we read what you sent, we'll come back with a short list of clarifying questions — usually 5–8 questions — and a 15-minute call to walk through them. By the end of that call, we have an inventory document that lists each workflow with: a 2–3 sentence summary in our words, a frequency estimate (e.g., '~50 times a month'), the rough time-per-instance, and any constraints we noticed (regulatory, confidential data, dependencies on a specific tool you can't change).
You'll see the inventory document before we move to the next step. If we summarized something wrong, you tell us, and we correct it. This sounds like a small thing. It's not. Most automation projects that fail later are projects where the inventory was wrong at the start.