“Our team is buried in manual work.”
Nobody decided to do it this way. It accumulated — one workaround at a time — until moving data between systems became somebody's actual job.
What this usually looks like.
- 01
Invoices or orders arrive as documents and get retyped into a system by a person.
- 02
Approvals are chased over email, and stall silently whenever somebody is on leave.
- 03
The monthly report is rebuilt from scratch by exporting, pasting and reconciling.
- 04
At least one role exists mainly to carry data between two systems that don't talk.
Why it happens.
Manual steps are rarely designed. They appear as the patch between two systems that were bought years apart, and the cheapest fix at the time was a person. That patch then gets hired around: the workaround becomes a role, the role becomes a team, and the original gap is never revisited because it no longer looks like a system problem.
The other reason is that nobody owns the process end to end. Each department sees its own leg of it and each leg looks reasonable in isolation, so the total cost — in hours, in delay, in the errors that surface at audit — is never added up in one place. That total is usually the first genuinely surprising number a diagnosis produces.
How we approach it.
Count the real cost of the loop
We trace one full cycle end to end and put a number on it: touches, hand-offs, waiting time, rework. Some loops turn out to be cheaper to leave alone, and we say so.
Automate the path, keep the judgement
Machines are good at moving, matching and routing; people are good at deciding. We automate the movement and keep a human at the points where a wrong call is expensive.
Make it auditable by default
Every step timestamped, every exception routed somewhere real rather than back into an inbox. Retention enforced by the system instead of by filing discipline.
What we'd actually build
Named here for the first time, because it follows from the diagnosis — not the other way round.
- Power Automate flows for intake, routing and approval, with deputy handling
- Document capture with AI Builder OCR or Azure OpenAI where the format varies
- SharePoint Online archiving with retention applied automatically at filing
- Multi-stage approval chains that escalate instead of stalling
- n8n orchestration for anything that crosses the Microsoft boundary
- Automated reporting so the monthly rebuild stops being a task
- Invoice arrives
Supplier invoices land as documents instead of paper that has to be stamped and carried.
- AI Builder OCR
Invoice data is captured on arrival, so nothing is retyped by a person.
- Approval — stage 1 of 3
The invoice routes to the first approver in the chain rather than to a physical in-tray.
Approver unavailable? It continues to their deputy instead of waiting. - Approval — stages 2 and 3
The same routing repeats through the remaining two stages of sign-off.
- SharePoint archive
Filed with 10-year retention applied automatically, carrying a complete approval history.
Paper-free, audit-proof accounts payable.
A Swiss care provider's supplier invoices were stamped, physically walked between department heads and filed in binders. Every invoice now carries a complete timestamped audit trail, and deputy routing keeps approvals moving when someone is away.
Read the write-upFind out whether that's really the problem.
A System Review is a fixed-fee, time-boxed diagnosis. You get written findings and a prioritised roadmap with effort estimates, and the fee is credited against any build that follows.