Business automationfor the work your team repeats by hand.

Taking a process a person carries out by hand - a quote, an approval, an invoice run, a new-client setup - and having software carry it out instead, triggered by the thing that should trigger it rather than by someone remembering. The useful distinction is between steps that are decisions and steps that are repetition. Only the second kind should be automated, and a good automation leaves the decision with a person and removes everything around it.

With the step that is re-keyed most often, not the one that sounds most impressive. In most businesses that is the same customer, order or set of hours being typed into two systems by one person - and fixing it is a connection between tools you already pay for, which is the cheapest automation there is. The second place is wherever a thing waits for a human to notice it: the quote not chased, the approval sitting in a text thread, the invoice raised a fortnight late.

Whatever fits, and I will not pretend to a specialism in any of them. Most of what I build is a direct connection between the systems you run, on a real database, because the work that matters most - a checklist that re-dates itself, an approval with a reason attached, a pipeline that flags a stalled job - needs logic those tools are not built to hold. Where a connector product does the job, it is cheaper and I will say so.

The same work under three names, and the names mostly tell you who is selling it. Workflow automation tends to mean the hand-offs between people; process automation tends to mean a single repeatable procedure; business automation is the whole of it across an operation. What you are buying in every case is a step a person no longer does, and the useful question is which steps those should be.

Sometimes, and sometimes the answer runs the other way. LINK's own CRM, lead management and automation replaced about $40,000 a year of subscriptions across nine businesses, because no product matched how the group runs. But a business whose process is close to a product's model should buy the product - that is cheaper, and you will hear it in the first conversation. The honest version of this work includes recommending something you can simply buy.

That is a different job, and LINK Marketing does it: lead capture, CRM and pipeline setup, nurture sequences and the follow-up machinery that turns an enquiry into a booked job. This page is the operations side - what happens to the work once it is won. The two meet at the hand-off from lead to job, and that join is part of the work here.

The aim is that you find out from the system, not from a customer. The builds on this page are designed that way: Eventman's Today view puts overdue items first and a daily digest goes out, Recruited flags a candidate who has sat in a stage too long, and FEUM sends an uncertain order to review instead of retrying it blindly. And because the code and the logic are yours, your own developer or IT team can read it rather than waiting on a vendor's roadmap.

No. LINK is in Fortitude Valley, and the mapping sessions are better in person, so Brisbane businesses get those. The build itself is remote, so clients are anywhere in Australia.