The self-audit · free · no email
How much of your business could run itself?
Twenty yes/no questions, two minutes. The line untangles as you go. No email needed — your results appear on screen, and nothing you answer leaves your browser unless you send it to us yourself.
Before the twenty · one number
How many people work in the business?
Include yourself and part-timers. It sets the scale of the arithmetic at the end — the same broken process costs a team of sixteen four times what it costs a team of four.
Enter how many people — 1 to 250 — before the questions.
And one more — then the twenty
What kind of business is it?
Pick the closest — it sharpens the ranking. None of them fit? That's an answer too; the ranking stays general. (Keys: 1–9 and 0, or S for something else.)
The 20-process self-audit — The Quiet Engine · quiet-engine.co.uk/audit
Prefer paper — or reading ahead? Here are the twenty, whole. Tick what's true of a normal week.
Money in
- Does chasing money depend on someone remembering to do it?
- Do quotes or proposals wait on someone finding time to write them?
- Does "did we invoice for that?" ever have no clear answer?
- Do payments arrive without anyone knowing what they're for?
Paper & re-typing
- Does anyone re-type data from one system into another?
- Do customers email documents that then live in an inbox?
- Does onboarding a new customer involve a paper checklist?
- Do you find mistakes weeks after they happened?
Knowing where things stand
- Is there a spreadsheet only one person really understands?
- Do certificates, renewals or deadlines live in someone's head?
- Does Monday start with copy-pasting numbers into a report?
- Do customers ask "what's the status?" because they can't see it?
Out & about
- Do staff phone the office to ask what's booked or scheduled?
- Are photos or documents stuck on individual phones?
- Does work get planned in WhatsApp?
- Do appointments get missed because reminders are manual?
The glue
- When a customer emails, is it ever unclear whose job the reply is?
- When someone's on holiday, does part of the business stall?
- Have you kept a tool "because moving would be a nightmare"?
- Do you only find out something's run out when someone goes to get it?
Count your yeses.
0–4: not much here is shouting for software — whatever you're doing, it's working. Run the list again in a year.
5–10: pick the two or three that sting most — that's where module one usually lives. The use-cases index shows how each one runs itself.
11+: you're likely paying every week for work software could do. Worth mapping properly.
However many you ticked: bring the marked-up sheet to a free process audit and you'll leave with a written map, whether or not we ever work together.
Your self-audit
0 of your 20 processes could probably run themselves.
Not much here is shouting for software. Whatever you're doing, it's working — print the checklist, run it again in a year.
Worth leaving alone
What are those costing you?
We've started the counter deliberately modest — one hour a week for each process you flagged, across the whole team. Most owners under-count; set it to your real week.
£0 a year
At the £19 loaded admin wage, over 46 working weeks.
Under about three hours a week, a retainer is hard to justify — the arithmetic is against it. Fix the worst one cheaply, keep the checklist, and come back when it grows.
This is illustrative arithmetic from your own numbers, one verified wage and 46 weeks — the right order of magnitude, not a to-the-pound invoice.
A priced cost is not a captured saving. Getting it back means fixing one process at a time, and measuring each fix.
Start here
Bring the answers to a free process audit.
Thirty minutes. We take your twenty answers and turn them into a written map of what could run itself — module one proposed, whether or not we ever work together.
Every question here maps to a process pattern we've written up — the use-cases index shows how each one runs itself. The hours arithmetic uses the same ONS-checked wage as our calculators, with the full working on the how-we-count page →. Want the pounds first? The cost-of-manual-work calculator → prices the whole firm from your headcount. This tool is maintained by The Quiet Engine — custom software for UK small businesses, on a monthly retainer.