AI automation in Manchester
AI automation, mapped in your Manchester office rather than on a call
We come to your premises anywhere inside the M60, watch the admin actually happen, and then build the automation that removes it. Every example on this page runs in our own Miles Platting office.
From £500plus VAT for a first build. Discovery £249, credited against builds over £1,000.
Manchester based at M40 8BB. Company 13356970. On-site process mapping included inside the M60.
The Manchester version of the admin problem
It is the same layer of invisible work everywhere, but the shape it takes around this county is fairly consistent once you have looked at enough of it.
- A workshop in Trafford Park retyping supplier invoices into the accounts every Friday.
- An agency in Ancoats copying enquiries out of a shared inbox into a spreadsheet.
- A trades firm checking three systems to find out whether a job in Bolton was ever booked.
- A practice in Didsbury building the same monthly report by hand because nothing joins up.
- A distributor near the M60 reconciling marketplace sales in three browser tabs at six in the evening.
- And in every one of them, one person who remembers everything and cannot take a fortnight off.
None of it is difficult work. All of it is repetitive, and repetitive work done by a tired person at eight in the evening is where the errors come from.
Why we map Manchester processes on site
This is the genuine difference between a local automation supplier and a remote one, and it is worth explaining because it changes what gets built.
Ask somebody to describe how an invoice gets into their accounts and you will get the official version: it arrives, it is checked, it is entered. Stand next to them while they do it and you will find the printed copy in the tray, the WhatsApp message from the supplier with the corrected figure, the spreadsheet that exists because the accounting package will not do one specific thing, and the rule about Thursdays that nobody has ever written down.
Automating the described version produces something that works in testing and fails in the second week. Automating the observed version produces something that survives. That gap is why we do discovery in the room wherever we can, and being twenty minutes from most of Greater Manchester is what makes that affordable to offer rather than a chargeable extra.
The second thing on-site mapping catches is who actually owns each step. Automation projects fail more often through ownership than through technology: nobody notices when it stops, because nobody was ever the person who noticed. Working out in person who that will be, before anything is built, is worth more than any amount of clever engineering.
What a discovery session involves
Two to three hours at your premises, with whoever actually does the work rather than only whoever manages it. We map one process end to end, count how often each step happens and how long it takes, and mark which steps need judgement and which just need somebody to be present.
You leave with the map and a fixed quote whether or not you proceed. It costs £249 and is credited in full against any build over £1,000, so if you go ahead it has cost you nothing.
The test we apply before quoting
How many times a week does this happen, and how long does it take. Multiply, times fifty, compare with the build cost. A surprising number of automation ideas fail that arithmetic, and we say so at the point where saying so costs us the sale.
Something that happens twice a year should be done by hand however satisfying it would be to automate. The full method is on our national automation page.
Automations running in our own Manchester office
Not case studies from a brochure. These run in our own office at M40 8BB and have done for a long time.
Supplier invoices into the accounts
An invoice arrives by email, the figures are read off the PDF, a bill is created with the original attached, and anything that does not match goes to a person. Six suppliers, six ugly layouts, no retyping.
Enquiries recognised and routed
Incoming mail classified, matched to a customer where one exists, turned into a lead with an owner and acknowledged automatically. Our inbox stopped being an archaeology site.
Read the case studyRepair triage and quoting
An enquiry read, classified against our own triage rules, and a quote drafted from a library of priced work. A human approves every one before it is sent. Days became minutes.
Read the case studyMarketplace sales reconciled
A sale detected, the invoice raised, the transaction recorded and the stock position updated. What used to be an end-of-day job in three tabs is now something we check rather than do.
Quote approvals moving the job on
A customer approves work in writing, the job updates itself, the next stage begins and the technician is told. No verbal agreements to argue about later.
Quote and job managementManagement reporting
Customer, job, time and accounting information pulled into the handful of numbers we actually look at on a Monday, instead of somebody building a spreadsheet.
Why we can say this with a straight face
Built in Miles Platting, for a business with the same problem
Manchester PC is an office-based repair and services business at Cariocca Enterprises on Sawley Road. The automations above were not built as products. They were built because the admin around the actual repairs was eating our evenings, and we had the unusual advantage of being able to build software rather than only buy more of it.
The invoice parser is the one we are most attached to, because it was the most annoying to get right. One supplier's PDF layout was genuinely hostile, the sort where the numbers are not really in a table at all. We could have accepted mostly right and checked everything by hand, which would have defeated the point. Getting it reliable took real engineering, and it now runs without anybody thinking about it.
We also pulled things back. A couple of workflows we automated, watched carefully for a few weeks, and then returned to a person, because the output was not good enough for a business with a reputation in this city to protect. Knowing which is which is most of the skill, and you only learn it by running these things in anger with your own customers on the line.
So when we quote a Manchester business for a build, we are not estimating from a framework. We have made these mistakes with our own money first, about fifteen feet from where this page was written, which is why the discovery step exists and why we will tell you when an idea is not worth doing.
A couple of workflows we automated, watched, and deliberately undid. That is not a failure of the technology, it is what paying attention looks like.
Read the whole storyHow a Manchester automation build runs
Five stages, and you can stop after the first with something useful in your hands.
- 01
Discovery, at your premises
We map what happens now, step by step, including the bits that only exist in somebody's head. On site anywhere inside the M60. You keep the map and the fixed quote either way.
- 02
Agree the boundary
What the system may do alone, what needs approval, and what should always go to a person. Your call, written down before anything is built.
- 03
Build and test on real data
Built against your actual awkward cases rather than a tidy example. The exceptions are where these things live or die.
- 04
Run it alongside
For the first period it runs while a person still checks, so you can see what it does before trusting it with anything.
- 05
Hand over and watch
Logging you can actually read, alerts when something looks wrong, and somebody twenty minutes away to ring when it does.
What Manchester businesses automate first
Drawn from the discovery sessions we have run around Greater Manchester. The first column is the symptom, not the industry.
| The symptom | What we usually automate | Typical build |
|---|---|---|
| Retyping invoices into the accounts | PDF extraction into your accounting package | From £1,500 |
| Enquiries buried in a shared inbox | Classification, matching and acknowledgement | From £1,500 |
| Quotes written from scratch each time | Draft quotes from a priced library, human approved | From £1,500 |
| Checking three systems for one answer | Connecting the systems, one source of truth | From £3,000 |
| Monthly reports built by hand | Automated reporting from your live data | From £500 |
| Chasing the same supplier every month | Scheduled reminders and exception alerts | From £500 |
All plus VAT, with monthly support from £49. These are honest starting points rather than ceilings, because two builds that sound identical can differ by a factor of five once you look at the systems involved.
What we will tell Manchester businesses not to automate
A short list, because a page selling automation ought to be honest about its limits. These conversations save people money and we have them often.
A process that is a mess
If a process is chaotic, automating it makes the chaos faster and harder to see. Tidy it first, on paper, with the people who do it. Sometimes that alone fixes the problem and there is nothing left to build.
We have ended discovery sessions by recommending a change to who does what, at no further cost. That is a better outcome than selling a build.
Anything where being wrong is expensive and silent
Paying money, committing to prices, sending contractual documents. These get prepared automatically and approved by a person. The time saved by removing the approval is small and the cost of one bad automatic decision is not.
Judgement dressed up as a rule
If two experienced people in your business would handle the same case differently, that is judgement and it does not belong in a rule engine. Automate the gathering of the information and leave the decision where it is.
Something that happens rarely
Twice a year is not a candidate however irritating it is. The build cost will never come back, and every automation carries a small ongoing burden of being kept working as the systems around it change.
Data protection applies to all of it. Anything touching customer records means deciding what the system may see, where it is processed and how long anything is kept, in line with the ICO guidance on AI and data protection. We settle that at the start rather than retrofitting it.
How to find your own automation candidates
You do not need us to work out where the time is going. This is the exercise we run in a discovery session, and you can do most of it yourself over a coffee before you ring anybody.
Take last week and list every task somebody did more than twice. Not projects, tasks. Reading an invoice. Copying a phone number into a spreadsheet. Checking whether an order shipped. Sending the same reminder to the same sort of person. Be specific enough that you could hand the list to a temp.
Against each one, write roughly how long it takes and how often it happens. Multiply. Most owners are surprised, not by the big items but by the small ones: the four-minute job that happens eleven times a week is a whole working day a month, and nobody has ever costed it because it never appears on an invoice.
Now mark each task with whether it needs judgement. Be strict about this. Does it need somebody to weigh something up, or does it just need somebody to be there? The second kind is your automation list, and it is usually longer than people expect once they stop being polite about it.
The three shapes worth looking for
The first is information moving between two systems that do not talk. Anything you type into one place having read it from another is a candidate, and it is usually the easiest thing to fix and the quickest to pay back.
The second is anything that depends on somebody remembering. Follow-ups, renewals, checks, reminders. Humans are unreliable at this and feel bad about it, which wastes two things at once.
The third is reading. Extracting a handful of facts out of a document or a message so that something else can happen. That used to require a person and largely does not any more, and it is where the AI part genuinely earns its place rather than being decoration.
Start with the one that annoys somebody most
Not the biggest, not the most impressive. The one that makes somebody sigh on a Friday. Irritation is a surprisingly good proxy for repetition, and it also means the first project has an obvious champion who will actually tell you whether it worked.
Getting one thing genuinely finished beats half-building four, which is how most automation programmes quietly die about four months in.
What good looks like six months later
The first sign of a healthy automation is that nobody talks about it. It has stopped being a project and become part of how the week works, in the same way nobody discusses the dishwasher. If people are still checking its output line by line after two months, something is wrong with either the build or the trust, and both are fixable.
The second is that somebody owns it. Not a department, a person who would notice if it stopped. That is usually fifteen minutes a month rather than a role, but if the honest answer is nobody, it will degrade and you will find out from a customer rather than from a screen.
Bring that list to a discovery session and we will price the top three properly. Plenty of Manchester businesses have done the exercise and concluded they needed one small build rather than the programme of work they were imagining, which is a perfectly good outcome.
Frequently asked questions
Do you visit Manchester businesses on site?
Yes, and for discovery we prefer to. On-site mapping is included anywhere inside the M60 and available by arrangement across the rest of Greater Manchester. Standing in the room where the work happens produces a materially better automation than a video call does.
What does AI automation cost in Manchester?
Discovery is £249, credited in full against any build over £1,000. Simple builds start at £500, connected workflows from £1,500 and multi-system work from £3,000, all plus VAT, with support from £49 a month. Location does not change the price.
Do we have to change the software we already use?
Usually not. Most of what we build connects tools you already pay for. Occasionally something genuinely will not integrate and then you have a real choice to make, but we would rather work with your setup than sell you a migration.
How long does a build take?
A simple one is one to two weeks, a connected workflow three to six. The variable is almost never the code. It is how quickly we can get access to systems and how many awkward exceptions turn up once we look at real data.
What happens when it breaks?
It will eventually, usually because something it depends on changed without notice. That is what the monthly support covers. Everything is logged and alerted so we generally know before you do, and if it needs a face-to-face we are twenty minutes away.
Will this put someone in our team out of a job?
In a business this size, almost never. What it removes is the part of the job nobody wanted: the retyping, the checking, the chasing. In practice it postpones a hire rather than replacing a person, and it is worth telling your team that early.
Who owns what you build?
You do. The workflows, the configuration and the documentation are yours, and if you ever move elsewhere we hand over everything including the awkward parts. We are not interested in building something you cannot leave.
Can you automate things in FreeAgent, Xero or QuickBooks?
Yes. Accounting workflows are among the most common builds we do, because invoice and bill handling is repetitive, high volume and genuinely tedious. What is possible depends on what your package exposes to other software, which we check during discovery rather than promising in advance.
Is the discovery fee really refundable?
It is credited in full against any build over £1,000, so if you proceed it has cost you nothing. If you do not proceed you keep the process map and the fixed quote, and several Manchester businesses have used that map to make changes themselves without buying anything from us.
Can you work with our existing IT provider?
Yes, and we often do. Automation usually needs access to systems somebody else looks after, and the sensible arrangement is that they keep doing what they do while we build on top. We would rather cooperate than turn it into a territorial argument with the client stuck in the middle.
What if our systems change next year?
Then the automation needs adjusting, which is what the monthly support covers. Software providers change their interfaces without asking anybody, and something that has run perfectly for eight months can stop overnight because a third party altered a field name. That is normal, and it is why we log everything rather than assuming things keep working.
Where this connects
The national detail, the local hub, and the case studies behind the examples above.
- AI in ManchesterThe local hub: who we work with across Greater Manchester and where we visit.
- Business process automationThe full national page: how builds work, the complete price ladder, what we refuse.
- AI consultancy in ManchesterIf the question is broader than one process, start here instead.
- AI Opportunity AssessmentWhere automation would genuinely pay, ranked, before you spend on a build. £99.
- How we sorted our own inboxThe full case study of the email triage described above.
- What AI automation can actually doThe plain-English primer, with no pricing attached.
Bring us the job you hate most
Book an automation discovery and bring the task that irritates somebody every single week. We will come to you, map it properly, tell you honestly whether it is worth automating, and give you a fixed price. The map is yours either way.
All prices plus VAT. Discovery £249, credited against builds over £1,000.