The Diagnostic · Four weeks · Fixed price
Find the hours. Then get them back.
The Capacity Recovery Audit is a four-week, fixed-price look at where your organisation's time actually goes, what AI and automation can recover, and what the first build costs. You finish with a scored register and a quote for the first build.
€22,500 to €29,500 depending on size. On site in Ireland. Led by the person who writes the readout.
A 70-person construction consultancy asked us where the time was going. The audit found 580 to 630 hours a month, about three people of senior time, in re-keying between a scheduling tool and a pricing database. The first build was quoted at the readout. The audit then became a standing engagement.
€560k
of hidden margin found for a food distributor, in a week.
1 week
of finance time a month handed back to a regulated financial services firm.
0 hires
needed when a law firm took on 33% more volume.
Each of these started as an audit. See the work →
How it runs
Four weeks. One person leads it end to end.
Week 1
Where the time goes
Forty-five-minute sessions with each team lead. We are after the work people do around the systems: re-keying, chasing, reconciling, formatting, reporting. By the end of the week there is a list of every repeatable task, who does it and how many hours a month it eats.
Week 2
What the systems can actually give up
We look at the tools you already run, what they export, what they will accept back in, and where the data really lives. Most of the hours are trapped between two systems that were never joined. This week says which joins are cheap and which are not.
Week 3
Scoring
Every candidate gets two scores: how hard it is to build, and how hard it is to get people to use. The second one usually decides. The result is a register ranked by hours recovered per unit of effort. The items that will be slow to land are marked as slow.
Week 4
The readout
A plain-English deck and a one-page summary for the leadership team, with a number on every line. The top item on the register comes with a fixed-price quote to build it, so the first decision can be taken in the room.
What you get
Four things, all of which you keep.
The register
Every repeatable task in the business, with hours per month, owner, and a build and adoption score. Yours to keep and re-score.
The readout
A leadership deck and a one-pager. What we found, what it means, the 90-day plan, the three decisions.
The first quote
The top item on the register priced as a fixed-price build. Take it or leave it; the register stands either way.
A working proof
Where it is cheap to do, we build a working slice of the top item during the audit so the readout can show it running.
Who it is for
You will recognise yourself in one of these.
- Twenty to three hundred people, and a leadership team that suspects the hours are going somewhere but cannot see where.
- A finance, operations or admin team that has grown by adding people rather than removing steps.
- You have already bought Copilot, or Xero, or a case-management system, and the manual work did not go away.
- You want a number before you commit to a build, from someone with no stake in which tool gets picked.
If you are a law firm, the same audit runs against the matter lifecycle and billing. Start there →
The price
€22,500 for organisations up to about 60 people. €29,500 up to about 300. Fixed, ex VAT, agreed before we start. If the audit finds less than its own cost in recoverable hours, we will say so at the readout and you will not be asked to build anything.
Where a build follows, the audit fee is credited against it if the build starts within 90 days.
600 hrs
a month is what the last audit found in a 70-person firm.
€280k
a year is what 600 hours a month costs at the CSO average labour rate of €38.92 an hour.
12×
the audit fee, sitting in the register before a single build. The first build is quoted at the readout so you can see the payback on the same page.
Your numbers will differ. The audit's job is to replace these with yours. Labour cost source: CSO Earnings and Labour Costs, Q1 2026.
Tell us where you think the time is going. We will tell you whether an audit is worth it.
A thirty-minute call. If the answer is a smaller piece of work, or none, you will hear that on the call.
Or call +353 86 021 2029.