Which processes to automate with AI first: a scoring sheet
A free scoring sheet for picking the first workflow to automate with AI: volume, rules, error cost, data access and exceptions. No email needed.
To decide which business processes to automate with AI first, score each candidate on the same six factors and start with the highest total.
In short:
- Start with work that takes a lot of hours each week, follows rules you could write on one page, and where a mistake is cheap to spot and undo.
- Score each candidate on six factors, 1 to 5 points each: hours a week, how clear the rules are, how often a case goes off the usual path, what a mistake costs, whether the tools can be connected, and where the data has to live. The highest total out of 30 goes first.
- Put a dollar figure on the hours. Use your own payroll if you can. If you can’t, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage for bookkeeping clerks at $24.36 an hour in May 2025, so 10 hours a week of that work comes to about $1,055 a month in wages.
- For now, leave alone anything that pays, files or sends something in your name without a person approving it.
- The sheet is at the end of this post as plain text you can paste into a spreadsheet. No sign-up.
Which business processes should you automate with AI first?
Pick the ones where volume is high, the rules are clear and a mistake is cheap.
The workflow that annoys your team the most isn’t always the best place to start. If the rules are fuzzy and mistakes are expensive, the project gets eaten by exceptions and reviews, and it’s hard to tell whether it worked. A dull, high-volume workflow with clear rules gives you a result you can measure in a few weeks. That result also tells you what the next, harder project would involve.
Three questions do most of the sorting:
- How many hours a week does this take, across everyone who touches it?
- Could a new hire do it from a one-page checklist?
- If the automation gets one wrong, how long does it take to notice and fix?
The scoring sheet turns those three questions, plus three practical checks, into a number you can compare across workflows.
How do you score a workflow? The six factors
Score every workflow on the same six factors. Each gets 1 to 5 points, so the maximum is 30.
Hours a week, counted across everyone who does the work:
| Hours a week | Points |
|---|---|
| Under 5 | 1 |
| 5 to 10 | 2 |
| 10 to 20 | 3 |
| 20 to 40 | 4 |
| More than 40 | 5 |
These are the same bands our free workflow check uses.
Score the other five factors with this table. Give 2 or 4 points when a workflow sits between two descriptions:
| Factor | 5 points | 3 points | 1 point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rules | A new hire could do it from a one-page checklist | Mostly rules, with some judgement calls | It depends on experience every time |
| Exceptions | Fewer than 1 case in 20 goes off the usual path | About 1 case in 10 | 1 case in 4 or more |
| Cost of a mistake | Minutes to spot and undo, like a wrong label on an email | An hour of clean-up or an annoyed customer, like a wrong field in the CRM | Money moves or it can’t be undone, like a payment, a filing or a sent quote |
| Tools | Every step runs through software with an API or a ready-made connector | Some steps live in email attachments, PDFs or spreadsheets | Paper, screenshots or a system with no way in |
| Data | Any reputable cloud service is fine | Cloud is fine with a signed data processing agreement | It all has to stay on your own servers |
If you don’t know yet where the data is allowed to go, score it 2 until you find out. A 1 on data doesn’t rule a workflow out. It means the model has to run on hardware you control, and that adds hardware and upkeep to the project.
Reading the total:
- 24 to 30: start here.
- 17 to 23: possible. Fix the lowest factor first, usually by writing the rules down or cleaning up where the data lives.
- Under 17: leave it for later.
If two workflows tie, the one with more hours goes first. We set these cut-offs by judgement, so if your sheet ranks two workflows in an order that feels wrong, look at which factor drove it before you override it.
Count the hours before you score them
A guess at hours is the weakest number on the sheet, so log it. For two weeks, write down for each workflow:
- how many items came through (invoices, emails, tickets, orders)
- roughly how many minutes each one took
- how many went off the usual path and needed someone to decide
- how many mistakes slipped through, and how long each took to fix
The exception count and the mistake log fill in two of the six factors for you.
Putting a dollar figure on the hours
Monthly cost = hours a week × 4.33 weeks × hourly wage.
Use your own payroll figure if you have one. If you don’t, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational wage data gives national figures. For May 2025, the median wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks was $24.36 an hour, and for general office clerks it was $21.64.
A worked example: 10 hours a week of invoice entry by bookkeeping clerks is 10 × 4.33 × $24.36, which is $1,054.79, or about $1,055 a month.
That figure is wages only. Benefits, payroll taxes and office costs come on top, so treat it as the lowest the work really costs you. To turn it into a payback period against a build price, use the AI automation payback worksheet.
Agent or plain automation? A plain-English test
Go through the workflow one step at a time and ask: could I write this decision as an if-then rule?
- If every step can be written as a rule, use plain automation: a Zapier or n8n workflow, or a short script. It’s cheaper to run and easier to check, and nothing in it needs a language model.
- If one step means reading messy text and picking from a fixed list, use plain automation with one AI step. The model reads the email or PDF and fills in fields such as category, supplier or amount, and everything after that follows rules.
- If the order of steps changes from case to case and the software has to choose what to do next, you need an agent.
Most first projects fall in the middle group. Agents are useful, but the more they’re allowed to do, the more can go wrong. OWASP’s list of the main risks in AI applications calls this excessive agency, and traces it to three causes: too many tools, too many permissions, and too much freedom to act without checking. Its advice is to give an agent only the tools the job needs and to require a person to approve high-impact actions before they happen. We go through where that line sits for invoices in when an invoice agent must ask a human.
What to leave alone for now
These can wait until you’ve got one workflow running and know what it takes to look after it:
- Payments, refunds, credit notes and anything else that moves money without a person approving it. An agent can prepare them, as long as a person approves each one.
- Messages that go to clients in your name without review. Have the automation write drafts, and leave sending for a second project.
- Work whose rules live in one person’s head and change every week. Write the rules down first. If you can’t, the automation can’t follow them either.
- Work that takes under an hour or two a week. At that size the build and the upkeep are hard to pay back.
- A process you’re about to change. Change it, let it settle, then automate the new version.
- Work whose data can’t leave your servers, if this is your first project. It can be done, but it’s a bigger first step than you need.
Copy the scoring sheet
Copy the text below into a plain text file, save it as scoring-sheet.csv and open it in Excel or import it into Google Sheets. Fill in the workflow name, hours a week and hourly wage. The sheet works out the monthly cost and the hours points for you. Score the other five columns from 1 to 5 using the table above.
Workflow,Hours a week,Hourly wage (USD),Monthly cost (USD),Hours points,Rules,Exceptions,Mistake cost,Tools,Data,Total (out of 30)
Workflow 1,,,=B2*4.33*C2,"=IF(B2>40,5,IF(B2>=20,4,IF(B2>=10,3,IF(B2>=5,2,1))))",,,,,,=SUM(E2:J2)
Workflow 2,,,=B3*4.33*C3,"=IF(B3>40,5,IF(B3>=20,4,IF(B3>=10,3,IF(B3>=5,2,1))))",,,,,,=SUM(E3:J3)
Workflow 3,,,=B4*4.33*C4,"=IF(B4>40,5,IF(B4>=20,4,IF(B4>=10,3,IF(B4>=5,2,1))))",,,,,,=SUM(E4:J4)For more workflows, copy the last row down. Sort by the Total column, then by Hours a week.
Score it in two minutes online
If you’d rather not build a spreadsheet, the free workflow check asks nine one-tap questions and takes about two minutes. There’s no sign-up, and it’s scored in your browser.
It asks about three of the six factors: hours a week, the tools the work runs through, and where the data needs to live. It also asks which repetitive workflows take the most time. It gives you a fit score out of 100, an estimate of the hours the work takes each month, and the workflow to start with. When you name more than one, it picks the most rule-based, in this order: invoices and accounts payable, data entry, CRM updates, email triage, support tickets, reporting, document review, scheduling.
It doesn’t ask how clear your rules are, how often a case goes off the usual path, or what a mistake costs, which are hard to answer in one tap, so use the sheet for those three.
When to get it measured properly
The sheet is enough to choose between workflows that are clearly different. Get help when:
- your top two workflows are within a few points of each other
- the hours are large enough that picking the wrong one would cost real money
- nobody can say exactly how the work runs today, step by step
That’s the job of our workflow diagnostic. In two weeks we map 3 to 5 workflows with the people who run them, measure what each one costs, pick the one to start with, and give you a written plan with a go or no-go and a fixed price for the build. It costs $2,500, credited in full to the build if you go ahead.
Next step: take the free workflow check, then fill in the sheet for the workflow it suggests.