Once people discover macros or Power Automate, the temptation is to automate everything. A few months later there are twelve half-working scripts, and the one person who understands them has moved teams. Picking the right first task matters more than picking the right tool.
In this article
Four questions for every task
- How often? Daily beats monthly. A monthly task needs to save a lot of time to be worth building.
- How long does it take by hand? Measure it once with a stopwatch. People underestimate by half.
- What does a mistake cost? A wrong GST figure or a payment to the wrong vendor costs more than the time spent.
- Does it stay the same? If the input file layout changes every month, the automation will break every month.
A quick scoring sheet
Put your tasks in Excel and score each question 1–5:
| Task | Frequency | Time | Error cost | Stability | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daily sales export clean-up | 5 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 225 |
| Monthly MIS pack | 2 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 160 |
| Yearly budget template | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 24 |
Score = Frequency × Time × Error × Stability (use =PRODUCT(B2:E2)). Multiplying, rather than adding, punishes any single weak answer — an unstable task scores low however long it takes.
Good first candidates
- Cleaning the same export every day: remove blank rows, fix dates, split columns. (Power Query, 30 minutes to build.)
- Combining files from a folder into one sheet.
- Saving each sheet or each customer as a separate PDF.
- Sending the same report email every Monday.
Poor first candidates
- Anything that needs judgement each time: approving claims, writing customer replies.
- Processes still changing — automate after they settle.
- Tasks that happen twice a year. Write a checklist instead.
Before you build
- Write down the manual steps exactly as you do them. Half the time you will spot steps that can simply be dropped.
- Keep a copy of a “known good” output to test against.
- Decide who will maintain it if you are on leave.
💡 The best automation is sometimes a better template, not a script. A properly built Excel table with formulas that fill down removes a surprising amount of “automation” work.
Which tool?
| Job | Tool |
|---|---|
| Clean and combine data | Power Query |
| Things inside Excel, formatting, PDFs, Outlook from desktop | VBA |
| Files, folders, Windows tasks | PowerShell |
| Cloud apps, approvals, email triggers | Power Automate |
| Keystrokes in old apps with no other way in | AutoHotkey or desktop RPA |
More on each in types of automation explained.
✨ Ask AI about this article
Stuck on a step? Ask a question and the AI answers using this article.
Free · AI can be wrong