The operations audit checklist

This is the checklist we run. You can run it yourself in an afternoon and spend nothing. If you would rather not, that is what the paid version is for.

Part 1 — Find the leaks

1. Map every handoff. Every point where work passes between two people, or between two systems. Handoffs are where things stall and get dropped.
2. Find the double entry. Every place the same information gets typed into more than one place. Booking into calendar into invoice into spreadsheet.
3. Find the single point of person. What stops entirely when one specific human is on holiday?
4. Find the copy-paste. Anyone moving data between two browser tabs by hand is an automation that has not been written yet.
5. Find the chase. How much time goes into following up — unpaid invoices, unanswered quotes, unconfirmed bookings?
6. Find the rework. What gets done twice because it was done wrong or lost the first time?

Part 2 — Price each one

7. Count the touches. Times per week a human touches it.
8. Time one touch. Honestly — including the context switch, not just the typing.
9. Use a loaded rate. Salary plus about 30% for real employer cost.
10. Annualise. Touches × minutes × rate × 48 weeks. Now every leak has a dollar value.

Part 3 — Decide

11. Sort by annual cost, not by annoyance. The loudest complaint is rarely the most expensive leak.
12. Apply the 4× rule. Do not spend more on a fix than four times what the leak costs per year. Anything under $3,000 a year, leave alone for now.

If you run this honestly and your biggest leak comes out under $3,000 a year, you have just saved yourself an automation project. That is a real result. Stop here.

Where people get stuck

Two places, every time. First, they cannot see their own double entry — it has been normal for so long it is invisible. Second, they guess at the touch counts instead of measuring, and the guesses come in about half the real number.

That is the whole reason the paid audit exists: an outsider with read-only access to your actual tools sees the invisible ones, and counts instead of guessing.