10 Business Processes You Should Automate Today

Introduction

Every business has processes that consume hours of employee time without adding strategic value. Data entry, follow-up emails, invoice routing, report generation — these tasks are essential but repetitive, and they are prime candidates for automation.

Research shows that 78% of organizations see a return on investment within six months of implementing workflow automation. Lead capture automation alone can deliver a 280% ROI, while invoice processing automation reaches up to 450%.

Here are 10 business processes you should automate today, starting with the ones that deliver the fastest results.

1. Email Follow-Ups

Manual follow-ups are one of the biggest time sinks in sales and marketing. Reps forget to follow up, timing is inconsistent, and leads go cold.

What to automate: Trigger follow-up email sequences based on prospect actions — form submissions, email opens, meeting no-shows, or deal stage changes. Set delays between messages and personalize content using dynamic fields.

Impact: Companies that automate email follow-ups report that lead-to-opportunity conversion rates improve from an average of 12% to 23%. No lead gets "accidentally ignored" for days.

Tools to consider: HubSpot Marketing Hub, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp

2. Invoice Processing

Finance teams manually processing 50-200 invoices monthly spend an average of 18 minutes per invoice — downloading PDFs from emails, extracting data, entering it into accounting software, routing for approval, and tracking payment status.

What to automate: Use OCR to capture invoice data with 95%+ accuracy, auto-match to purchase orders, route approvals based on amount thresholds, and schedule payments automatically.

Impact: Invoice processing automation saves 15-20 hours per week and delivers up to 450% ROI. Processing time drops from 5-10 days to same-day.

Tools to consider: Zapier connected to your accounting software, Make for multi-step financial workflows

3. Lead Routing and Scoring

When leads come from five or more sources — website forms, LinkedIn, email inquiries, trade shows, referrals — manually sorting and assigning them wastes time and loses prospects. Studies show that 35% of leads get lost in manual routing processes.

What to automate: Auto-enrich leads with company data, score them based on criteria like employee count and industry, and route high-scoring leads directly to sales reps with instant Slack notifications.

Impact: Lead response time drops from hours to minutes. One case study showed response time going from 4 hours to 5 minutes after automation.

Tools to consider: HubSpot CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Pipedrive

4. Employee Onboarding

Onboarding a new hire involves welcome emails, document collection, IT account creation, contract signing, training schedules, and payroll setup. When done manually, each step depends on someone remembering to do it.

What to automate: Trigger the entire onboarding sequence when an offer is accepted. Automatically send welcome emails, collect signed contracts, notify IT to provision accounts, and assign training modules.

Impact: Onboarding automation saves 6-8 hours per new hire and delivers 320% ROI. It also ensures consistency — every new employee gets the same experience.

Tools to consider: ClickUp, Monday.com, Pipefy

5. Reporting and Dashboards

Building weekly reports by copying data from multiple tools into spreadsheets is one of the most common time wasters in business. It is error-prone, tedious, and entirely automatable.

What to automate: Connect your data sources — CRM, analytics, ad platforms, financial tools — to automated dashboards that update in real-time. Schedule PDF reports to land in stakeholders' inboxes every Monday morning.

Impact: Teams save 5-10 hours per week on reporting. Decision-makers get accurate, timely data instead of stale spreadsheets.

Tools to consider: Zapier, Make, n8n

6. Social Media Scheduling

Manually posting to multiple social platforms throughout the day is an inefficient use of marketing resources. Content calendars exist, but execution still requires someone to copy-paste and publish at the right time.

What to automate: Schedule posts across all platforms from a single calendar. Use automation to repurpose content — turn a blog post into social snippets, schedule them across platforms, and track engagement automatically.

Impact: Marketing teams reclaim 5-8 hours per week. Posting consistency improves, and no scheduled content gets missed.

Tools to consider: Zapier for cross-platform workflows, Brevo for integrated marketing automation

7. Data Entry and Synchronization

When your team manually copies data between CRM, email marketing, project management, and accounting tools, errors are inevitable. A single typo in a phone number or email address can derail an entire workflow.

What to automate: Set up two-way data syncing between your core tools. When a contact is updated in your CRM, the change propagates to email marketing, support, and billing systems automatically.

Impact: Data accuracy improves dramatically. Teams stop spending time on data reconciliation and troubleshooting sync issues.

Tools to consider: Make, Pipedream, Workato

8. Approval Workflows

Purchase orders, time-off requests, content approvals, expense reports — any process that requires sign-off from one or more people tends to stall when managed through email or chat.

What to automate: Create structured approval workflows with automatic routing based on type, amount, or department. Send notifications when action is needed and escalate when approvals are overdue.

Impact: Approval cycle times decrease by 60-80%. Nothing sits in someone's inbox forgotten for days.

Tools to consider: Kissflow, Asana, ClickUp

9. Customer Support Ticket Routing

When support tickets arrive by email, chat, and phone, manually triaging and assigning them creates bottlenecks. Customers wait longer, and agents waste time on tickets outside their expertise.

What to automate: Automatically categorize incoming tickets by topic, urgency, and customer tier. Route them to the right team or agent instantly. Send immediate acknowledgment messages so customers know their request was received.

Impact: Support ticket routing automation saves 10-15 hours per week and delivers 380% ROI. First-response times drop from hours to minutes.

Tools to consider: Zapier for multi-channel routing, Freshsales for integrated CRM and support

10. Inventory and Stock Alerts

For product-based businesses, manually monitoring stock levels and reordering is a recipe for stockouts and overstock situations. Both cost money.

What to automate: Set threshold-based alerts that notify your team when stock levels drop below minimum quantities. Automatically generate purchase orders or trigger reorder workflows.

Impact: Stockout incidents decrease significantly. Purchasing decisions are based on real-time data rather than periodic manual checks.

Tools to consider: Pipedream, n8n for custom inventory workflows

Where to Start

Do not try to automate all ten processes at once. Use this prioritization framework:

1. Week 1: Audit — Document your top repetitive workflows and calculate time spent on each
2. Week 2: Quick win — Implement one simple automation (email follow-ups or meeting scheduling are great starting points)
3. Week 3: High-ROI process — Tackle your biggest time sink (usually lead routing or invoice processing)
4. Week 4: Scale — Add a second automation, document SOPs, and track KPIs

Use the ROI formula to prioritize: (Annual Time Savings x Hourly Rate - Tool Costs) / Tool Costs x 100

Conclusion

Automation is not about replacing people — it is about freeing them to do work that actually requires human judgment, creativity, and relationship building. These 10 processes are proven starting points that deliver measurable ROI within weeks, not months.

Explore our workflow automation, sales automation, and business process automation categories to find the right tools for each process on this list.