Expert Opinion: Top 5 tasks businesses should be automating

Stockport IT support experts, Ctrl-S, explain the most important tasks small businesses should be automating to help achieve its goals.

Digital transformation is rapidly making its way to the top of business owners agendas due to the exciting benefits it can bring as well as necessary changes to remain competitive. With rising wage costs, increasing customer expectations and vastly changing technologies, it’s no surprise that many business owners are struggling to keep up. Technologies such as automation, which has evolved beyond basic task completion, help drive businesses to make smarter decisions, increase resilience and help harness the best out of their team.

Challenges Facing SMEs in 2025

Challenges for SMEs range from physical, to resourcing and digital. The challenges SMEs face are all interconnected and require a holistic approach to digital transformation to be taken.

Digital challenges include cybersecurity, cloud services and AI, requiring extensive technical knowledge to implement correctly. Another significant challenge for SMEs is financial constraints, with costs rising for services and compliance regulations getting tighter its forcing SMEs to get clever with their spending. This coupled with legacy systems, which often integrate poorly with newer platforms leads to inefficiencies and bottlenecks within your operations. Add in customer expectations growing, with increased demands for speed, responsiveness and personalisation to remain aligned with offerings from large enterprises many SMEs are struggling to keep up.

AI and Automation

AI and automation tools take advantage of cutting edge technology to bring predictive insights, streamline workflows and enhance customer service. These tools are everywhere and within reach of SMEs and when implemented effectively provide a solid return on investment by automating time consuming tasks.

The Power of Automation

Automation is changing the way businesses of all sizes work. Repetitive, manual, time consuming tasks are being mitigated and your team’s time replaced with higher value work. It also boosts accuracy, reduces errors and improves customer experiences due to faster and more consistent results.

Whilst there is an upfront cost, both financially and in time to configure automation, the cost often quickly pays for itself by reducing the need for your team to complete administrative tasks, allowing more customer work to be completed.

CTRL-S recommend five key areas to automate:

1. Reporting and analytics: Automation tools allow data from multiple sources to be automatically consolidated into dashboards or scheduled reports, allowing real time insights both internally and for customers without manual data entry and consolidation.
2. Internal task assignment and management: Automation can allow automatic delegation of work managed in project management software to appropriate team members. It also allows HR administration such as managing annual leave requests, shift scheduling and onboarding/offboarding process to be done instantly.
3. Invoicing and billing: Removing the leg work from credit control, with automated payment reminders, recurring automated invoicing and reconciliation speeds up cash flow and consistency with your billing.
4. IT operations and maintenance: Maintenance, updates, backups and incident mitigation   IT operations and maintenance: Maintenance, updates, backups and incident mitigation can all be automated, allowing your systems to perform at their best, with minimal downtime and alert your IT team in real time if something is wrong.
5. Leads and customer relationship management: Managing leads and customer relationships can be a very time consuming job. Automation allows this process to take care of itself, providing you with notifications when manual intervention, such as making a phone call, is required.

It’s no secret that automating tasks can bring huge benefits to your business. However, correct implementation is critical, with software having upfront cost to implement and configuration often being technically challenging and time consuming. It’s therefore critical that business owners get it right, ensuring that the changes they implement have the best possible impact on their bottom line.