How to Automate up to 44% of Your Company's Admin Tasks

According to a recent University of Oxford report around Automation in the Workplace - 34% of your company’s time is spent on admin tasks. And of those admin tasks, 44% could be automated.

Which is huge!

Assuming a 40-hour working week, that’s up to 6-hours per employee per week that could be saved by automating these admin tasks 🤯.

And by admin tasks, I mean the low complexity, repetitive jobs such as:

Data entry & processing 📝
Sales admin 💸
Scheduling, chasing & reminding 3rd parties 📈

The list goes on and on…

And these manual admin tasks not only take up a lot of time but will bottleneck your business.

As business leaders, we naturally form processes for everything. And as your business grows, you’ll naturally take on new projects and increase headcount. Which is great! But, the complexity of your back-office and the admin tasks associated will also grow (almost exponentially).

Graph demonstrating how back-office admin complexity grows exponentially with business growth (x-axis Business growth, y-axis Complexity of back-office admin)

At mmtm, we often speak to scale-up businesses in the grey area above that are now embroiled in complex spreadsheets, how-to documentation, and software systems that are unoptimised and out of control.

Leaving the business to feel bloated and full of admin people doing admin asks.

Which is ironic. In the early days, these processes worked and made your business a success!

But you’re now at a point where the business starts to hit a ceiling as it scales. And as a business leader, you’re now constantly on the back foot and fighting fires when you need to be proactive and on the front foot!

The good news is these bottlenecks are solvable using automation.

And the best businesses in the world are out there right now implementing a purpose-built, bespoke, software platform for their business’s back-office.

Graph demonstrating how a bespoke software platform will reduce back-office complexity as your business scales (x-axis Business growth, y-axis Complexity of back-office admin)

So as your business grows further, the software does the heavy lifting for you. Enabling the complexity of your team's back-office admin to decrease.

And by automating these back-office processes, you’ll:

Reduce costs 💸
Avoid human-error 🤦
Remove key-person issues 👨👩👧👦

And ultimately, you’ll improve the operational output of your business in terms of speed and quality.

Leaving you with happier customers, a happier team, and a more profitable business!

Martin Dick

Co-Founder, mmtm

Losing time to manual admin?

We've spent 10+ years helping businesses build bespoke web applications, automate complex workflows and replace messy spreadsheets with software.

If your back-office processes are becoming hard to manage, I'd be happy to talk through where automation could save time, reduce errors and give your team more room to focus on higher-value work!

Schedule a chat

Frequently Asked Questions

What admin tasks can be automated?

Plenty of repetitive admin tasks can be automated, especially work that follows a predictable process. Common examples include data entry, sales admin, customer updates, approval chasing, report generation, document processing, task reminders and moving information between systems.

How do I know if a manual process is worth automating?

A manual process is usually worth automating if it happens frequently, takes up valuable team time, creates errors, slows customers down or becomes harder to manage as the business grows. A good first step is to map the workflow, remove unnecessary steps, then identify which parts are repetitive enough to automate sensibly.