Every company is different, but after a few dozen projects the same handful of workflows keeps coming up. These five are a good place to start because they run often, they’re easy to measure, and they fail in obvious ways when something breaks.

1. Inbound lead routing

Form fill to assigned owner, with company data attached and duplicates merged. Typical saving is 3 to 5 hours a week, plus fewer leads sitting untouched over a weekend.

2. Client onboarding

A signed contract creates the project, the shared channel, the folder and the kickoff invite. Typical saving is 4 to 6 hours a month, and new clients stop waiting two days for a welcome email.

3. Invoice and payment reconciliation

Payouts get matched to invoices every night, and the ones that don’t match get flagged. Typical saving is 2 to 4 hours a week for whoever does the books, and a much shorter month-end.

4. The weekly numbers report

Revenue, pipeline and support numbers get pulled from the source systems and posted to Slack on Monday morning. Typical saving is 2 to 3 hours a week, and nobody argues about whose spreadsheet is right.

5. Support triage

Incoming tickets get tagged and routed, and common questions get a drafted reply that a person approves. The saving depends on volume. For one client with about 400 tickets a month, it was 15 hours a week.

What we’d leave for later

Leave anything that only runs a few times a quarter. The same goes for steps that depend on a judgment call nobody has written down. Those can wait until the first five are running and you trust them.