Framework · 6 min read
A Simple Framework for Deciding What to Automate First
You don't need a consultant to use this. You need fifteen minutes, a list of your firm's most annoying recurring tasks, and two questions.
Most firms don't struggle to find things worth automating — if anything, they can name ten in the first five minutes of thinking about it. The actual struggle is deciding what to do first, because doing everything at once usually means finishing nothing. Here's the framework we use with every client, simplified enough to run yourself.
The two questions that actually matter
For each task on your list, ask two things:
- Impact: if this were fixed, how much time or stress would it genuinely remove? Be honest — not every annoying task is actually costing much.
- Effort: how hard would this actually be to fix — in cost, time, or complexity?
That's the whole framework. Everything else is just plotting your list against those two questions.
The four quadrants
High impact, low effort
Do this first. These are your quick wins — often the highest-leverage moves you'll ever make, and usually cheaper than firms assume.
High impact, high effort
Your strategic bets. Worth doing, but plan for them — don't let one big project block every quick win sitting next to it.
Low impact, low effort
Nice-to-haves. Fine to do eventually, but don't let them consume time that quick wins deserve first.
Low impact, high effort
Skip these, at least for now. Naming why you're skipping something is as useful as naming what you're doing.
The order matters more than the list. Most firms already know what's broken — they just start in the wrong place.
A simple way to score your own list
Write down every task that bothers you or your team on a regular basis — don't filter yet, just get it all down. For each one, score impact and effort from 1 to 5. Plot them against each other, even roughly on paper. The high-impact, low-effort cluster is where to start, every time, regardless of what feels most urgent emotionally.
One caution: the task that feels most urgent isn't always the highest-impact one. Document chase feels urgent because it's loud and constant. A CRM gap feels quiet because nothing's actively on fire — but the quiet one is sometimes costing more over a year than the loud one. For most firms the honest winner is email and follow-up automation, because it touches every client, every week.
When this is worth a second set of eyes
This framework works fine solo for straightforward tasks. Where it gets harder is estimating effort accurately for anything involving new software, integrations, or data handling — firms often overestimate the effort of things that are actually quick, and underestimate the effort of things that look simple but touch several systems at once. Our overview of AI automation for accounting firms sets out what each workflow typically involves.
Next step
Want to know which workflow to fix first in your firm?
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