Aoraki Plumbing & Gas Ltd is a four-person plumbing and gas fitting business south-west of Christchurch. Grant owns it and works on the tools alongside two plumbers. Chrissy does the books and office admin twenty hours a week. That is the size and shape of business this review is built for, invented for this sample rather than a real client of mine.
The one process, and why
I looked at four things Aoraki could automate first, scored each on how much time it costs now and how much the fix would disrupt the plumbers' day, and ranked them.
| Candidate process | Time spent now | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| End-of-job invoicing | ~13 hrs/week | Chosen. One connection between two systems already in use, a short payback, and nothing changes for the plumbers on site. |
| Supplier invoice reconciliation | ~6 hrs/week | Real time cost, but three suppliers hand over paper dockets in three different formats. That's a data problem to fix first, not an automation to build first. |
| Job scheduling and dispatch | ~4 hrs/week | Not enough time on the table yet, and any fix changes how the plumbers work day to day. More disruption for less return. |
| Quote follow-up chasing | ~2 hrs/week | Too small on its own to clear a sensible payback window. |
End-of-job invoicing wins on every measure that matters here: it's the biggest time cost on the list, the fix touches only Chrissy's side of the process, and Grant and the two plumbers keep using Tradify exactly as they do now.
How it runs today
| Step | Who | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Log materials and hours against the job | Plumber, on site in Tradify | Already part of the job, no extra minutes |
| Pull the job into the costing spreadsheet, reconcile supplier dockets | Chrissy, office | 10 min |
| Re-type the line items into Xero to raise the invoice | Chrissy, office | 8 min |
| Check the invoice against the original quote before it goes out | Chrissy, office | 5 min |
Twenty-three minutes a job, thirty-four completed jobs a week on average across Grant and his two plumbers, comes to 782 minutes, about 13 hours a week. All of it lands on Chrissy, who is only in the office twenty hours a week to begin with.
What I'd build
One automated flow, built in Power Automate, connecting Tradify to Xero. When a job is marked complete in Tradify, the flow pulls the labour hours and materials, matches them against the original quote, and drafts the Xero invoice with the line items already filled in. If the total sits within 15% of the quote, it's ready for Chrissy to check and send. If it's outside that band, or a required field is missing, it lands in a queue for her to finish by hand instead of guessing at a number.
What it saves
| Metric | Today | After the build |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs a week | 34 | 34 |
| Minutes a job | 23 | 6 (review and approve the drafted invoice) |
| Hours a week | 13.0 | 3.4 |
| Hours saved a week | n/a | 9.6 |
The six minutes is an assumption, not a measurement: it's what I'd expect a check-and-approve step to take once the draft is already right most of the time. Nine and a half hours back a week is the number that follows from it, and it's Chrissy's time specifically, not a shared pool.
What it costs
Working from the numbers above:
- Chrissy's time, call it $32 an hour. Adjust it if your own number is different, the conclusion below moves with it, not the method.
- 9.6 hours saved × $32 an hour = $307 a week.
- $307 a week × 46 working weeks = about $14,100 a year.
- The build itself is one connection between Tradify and Xero with a single review step, no rebuild of either system. That sits at the simple end of the $4,000–$8,000 band I publish for a single automation. I'd fix it at $4,800 for this scope.
- $4,800 ÷ $307 a week ≈ 15.6 weeks. Call it three and a half months to pay for itself.
What could go wrong
- A plumber leaves materials or hours blank in Tradify. The flow flags any job missing a required field and routes it to Chrissy for the same manual entry she does today, rather than guess at a number.
- Xero or Tradify has an outage. Nothing about today's three-step process gets switched off, so a job just goes through the old path until the connection is back.
- The 34-jobs-a-week and 23-minutes-a-job numbers above turn out optimistic once real data is checked. I'd pull four weeks of actual Tradify job history and confirm both before committing to the $4,800 figure, rather than build on the estimate alone.
Grant is choosing between three things: build now at $4,800 and start recovering the 9.6 hours a week inside about three and a half months, hold off and keep doing it by hand while the business is this size, or spend four weeks confirming the job-count and time-per-job numbers before committing either way. Even a fairly generous miss on those two assumptions still clears the build cost inside two quarters, so the number that moves is the payback window, not whether it's worth doing. That's the decision every Workflow Review ends on: a number to decide against, not a guess.