Automation can ease your business workload

The average business owner needs an extra four hours in the working day to get through their admin, according to a OnePoll survey of 500 small business owners reported in 2023.

Four extra hours a day adds up to around 20 hours a week of routine, unproductive admin. That’s bad for the business and for your efficiency. Fortunately, technology and software can take on many of these low-level admin tasks.

Update, October 2026: since 6 April 2026, sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000 have had to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. That means keeping digital records and sending quarterly updates to HMRC using compatible software. The threshold falls to over £30,000 from 6 April 2027 (HMRC).

Better productivity through automation

Automation is an important way to ease your business workload, with a host of business apps and cloud-based systems offering ways to automate your admin.

Smart business tools keep growing in number and choice. Software now uses automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to take the more repetitive tasks out of your workflows.

Core processes that benefit from automation

• Automated bookkeeping: take a photo of your receipts, expenses and invoices, and optical character recognition (OCR) technology reads them and pulls the details through to your accounting software. That means much less typing, fewer keying errors and no more lost receipts. We can do the rest to make sure your records are accurate.
• Automated credit control: chasing debts and late-paying customers takes time. Credit control apps track who owes you what and send customised reminder emails as soon as an invoice is late. This cuts the time you spend chasing, can speed up cash collection and helps keep your aged debts down.
• Automated payment collection: the easier it is to pay you, the faster customers tend to pay. Automated card payments and cloud-based Direct Debit services let you take payment from a customer automatically when an invoice is due. Some will even match payments to invoices and help with your bank reconciliation.
• Automated reporting and forecasting: the better your reporting, the easier it is to make informed decisions about your strategy. Accounting platforms and finance tools now offer automatic, real-time reporting and forecasting, giving you quick access to the important numbers.
• Automated digital marketing: digital marketing is key to raising your business’s profile. Marketing platforms let you create and schedule social media posts in advance, or set up a sequence of emails to go to particular groups of customers.

Keep an eye on the basics

Automation is only as good as the information going in. It’s worth checking regularly that transactions are being matched and categorised correctly, especially in the first few months after you switch something on.

Whatever tools you use, you still need to keep accurate records of your business income and expenses. GOV.UK explains what records to keep if you’re self-employed and if you run a limited company.

Sources

Our main sources are HMRC and GOV.UK:

• Business records if you’re self-employed
• Running a limited company: company and accounting records

Talk to us about automation

If admin is holding you back, come and talk to us about how automation can take on some of the heavy lifting, as well as giving you the numbers you need for decision-making. We can review your business processes, identify where automation could help and help you choose apps that suit the way your business works.

Call us on 020 7164 0225, send us a WhatsApp message or email us at info@ibandco.co.uk.

You can also read about our bookkeeping services.

First published 13 May 2025. Tax content checked on 9 October 2026. This article reflects the rules at the date it was first published. Where something has changed since, we’ve added an update note. Rules and rates change, so please check with us before acting.