Free tool
What is slow work actually costing you?
The Friction Audit is a working spreadsheet. You list the tasks that eat your week, score them with numbers you already know, and it prices the problem — then tells you which tasks are worth automating and which aren’t.
How it works
- 1
List the recurring work
Invoicing, intake, re-entry between systems, chasing approvals — one row each. Three example rows come filled in so you can see how it reads.
- 2
Score with numbers you already know
How often it happens, how long it takes, who touches it, and what a mistake costs when it goes wrong. Ten minutes of honest typing.
- 3
Read the verdicts
Every task gets an annual price tag, an automation-fit score, and one of four calls: Automate now, AI-assist, Redesign first, or Leave it alone.
The four verdicts
- Automate now
- High volume, rule-based, digital data. A system can own this end to end.
- AI-assist
- Worth doing with a person in the loop — AI drafts, a human decides.
- Redesign first
- Expensive, but automating the current mess just makes the mess faster. Fix the process, then revisit.
- Leave it alone
- Costs less than it would cost to change. The sheet says so plainly.
Half the value is that fourth verdict. Some work costs less than it would cost to change, and a tool willing to say so is the reason to trust the other three.
Get the spreadsheet
Excel and Google Sheets. Formulas included — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for beyond this.
This sheet is step one of our Clarity Assessment — the full version traces these numbers through your actual systems and hands you a costed roadmap. The assessment fee credits toward a build.