Search for a "workflow audit template" or a "workflow analysis template" and most of what comes back is either a compliance checklist for a different meaning of audit, or a form with fields nobody explains. Search "process audit checklist" or "process mapping template free" and the same thing happens: boxes to tick, with no worked example showing what a good answer in any box actually looks like. This page is the worksheet itself, free, on one page to copy into whatever you write in, with every section explained in plain words — and, after the blank version, the same worksheet filled in on a real worked example: the weekly catering operations workflow in the Taste & Thyme Catering sample plan published on this site, a synthetic example whose figures are all in public. The fields mirror the capture used in these Notes from the start: steps, owners, exceptions, time, cost. Fill it in for one workflow — not the whole business — and at the end you have the thing most templates never produce: a total you watched being built, line by line, that you can argue with line by line.
How to use this worksheet
Work through the parts in order, on paper or in a document you copy from this page. Part 1 names the workflow. Parts 2 to 4 capture what actually happens. Parts 5 and 6 attach time and cost. Part 7 is where you name the problems and put a fix's published price next to each one. Do not skip to the money: a total built on steps nobody wrote down is a guess with arithmetic on it.
One honest note about what this costs you. The worksheet is free in cash. It is not free in time, and the time is yours — price it the same way the worksheet prices everything else, and label it honestly: the inputs are examples, and you replace them with your own. Say filling the worksheet in takes 2 hours, at $60 an hour that is $120 of owner time, spent once, on one workflow. If your rate is different, or it takes you longer, use your numbers. That labelled example is the only reader-cost figure on this page, because it is the only one that is yours to set.
Part 1 — Name the workflow
Fill in:
- Workflow name: the workflow in the words you use at work — booking in to invoice out, intake to delivery, order to payment.
- Where it starts: the event that sets it going — a booking comes in, an order lands, a client says yes.
- Where it ends: the event that closes it — the invoice is sent, the job is delivered, the payment is recorded.
- Who runs it, overall: one name. If nobody can be named, write that down — it is the first finding, not a reason to stop.
If you cannot fill in the start and the end in one sentence each, the workflow is still too big. Split it until the sentence is easy. One workflow is the whole discipline of this worksheet.
Part 2 — The steps, as they happen
Fill in, in order, one line per step:
- Step: what happens, in the order it actually happens — not the order it is supposed to happen.
- What is touched: the record, the sheet, the thread, the notebook, the tool the step uses.
- Where it waits: the place the work sits when the person stops — an inbox, a pile, a person's memory — and what it waits for.
Write the steps as they happen on a bad week as well as a good one. A step where a fact is copied from one record to another — retyped, re-entered, copied across — gets its own line, even if it takes a minute. Those copying steps are where the worksheet usually finds its first problem.
Part 3 — Owners
Fill in, for each step above:
- Owner: the person who does this step, named. Not the team — the person.
- If they are away: who does it then, named — or "nobody", written down as an answer, because "nobody" is a finding about the workflow, not about the person.
- Who else needs to know: the people the step's result has to reach, and how it reaches them today.
A step whose owner is whoever notices is a step with no owner. Mark it. The worksheet does not fix it; it makes it visible on paper, where it can be decided about instead of discovered on the day it fails.
Part 4 — Exceptions
Fill in the things that do not happen every time:
- Exception: what goes differently — the swap agreed after the sheet was printed, the order that arrives twice, the deposit paid in part.
- How often: roughly — most weeks, a few times a month, once a quarter. Rough and written beats exact and imagined.
- What happens then: who finds out, how, and what they do — including "a person notices and fixes it by hand", if that is the truth.
Exceptions are not edge cases. In a workflow run by hand they are usually where the cost is, because every exception is handled by a person improvising, and improvisation is never written down anywhere the next person can use.
Part 5 — Time
Group the steps into blocks of work done by one person at one pace, and fill in for each block:
- Block: the work, named the way the person doing it would name it.
- How long: how long one round of it takes, stated by the person who does it.
- How often: how often it happens — every week, 2 times a month, 1 time a quarter.
- Rate: the rate for the person doing it, confirmed by the owner rather than guessed.
Notice what this part does not need: an industry average, a benchmark, or a guess about businesses like yours. The hours and the rates are your business's own, and they can be checked against a real week.
Part 6 — Cost: add it up
For each block, fill in:
- Weekly cost: the block's time at that person's rate, spread across the weeks of a year when the block does not happen weekly.
- Yearly cost: the weekly cost across a full year.
Then add the blocks. The total is the worksheet's first real finding: not a feeling that the workflow is heavy, but a number built up block by block. Show the working to whoever owns the workflow and let them correct the hours and the rates. The corrected total is the one you decide with. The worksheet prices blocks of time. It does not price individual problems, and a filled-in worksheet that claims a tidy cost for each problem has split a block by a guess — write that warning on yours if anyone is tempted.
Part 7 — Name the problems, and put a fix's price next to each one
With the steps and the blocks in front of you, fill in:
- Problem: what goes wrong, in the words the business uses at work — not translated into consultant language.
- Which steps it sits in: the steps from Part 2 where the problem lives.
- A named fix: a tool or a change that addresses that problem.
- The fix's published price: what that fix is listed at, from the seller's own published price or a published catalog — written next to the cost of the blocks the problem sits in.
Do not write down what the fix will save. The honest comparison is simpler: the blocks this problem sits in cost this much a year, and this fix costs that much a year. Whether the fix is worth its price depends on how much of those blocks the problem really causes — and that judgement is the owner's, made possible by the blocks, not replaced by them.
The same worksheet, filled in: Taste & Thyme Catering
Here is the whole worksheet filled in on the example used across these Notes, so you can see the shape of a finished one. Taste & Thyme Catering is a synthetic example, labelled as such on the sample plan itself; its figures are the sample's own, not measurements of a real business.
Part 1, filled in: the workflow is weekly catering operations, starting when a booking comes in and ending when the event is staffed, the food is ordered, and the invoice is sent.
Parts 2 to 4, filled in, are where the four problems show up — named in the business's own words, exactly as the sample names them:
- Double-booked Saturdays, because the booking record lives in a spreadsheet and on a paper calendar, and the two drift apart — a Part 2 finding: the same fact is kept in two records, and no step keeps them in agreement.
- Ordering from memory, which produces ingredient shortages on some days and overbuys on others — a Part 4 finding: the exception is the ordering itself, decided from memory instead of a count written down.
- Group-text shift swaps that never reach the event sheet, so the sheet the team works from on the day is not the schedule they agreed — a Part 3 finding: the change is agreed by the people, and no step's owner carries it to the record.
- Invoices retyped by hand, and deposits nobody tracks — a Part 2 finding: the invoice figures already exist in the workflow's own records and are typed again anyway, and the deposit has no line in any record at all.
Parts 5 and 6, filled in: the workflow takes 18.62 hours a week and costs $722.31 a week, which is $37,560 a year, built from four blocks:
- The owner's own work — 5 hours a week at $60 an hour. That is $300 a week, and $15,600 a year.
- Event coordination — 12 hours a week at $30 an hour. That is $360 a week, and $18,720 a year.
- Kitchen deep-clean coordination — 2 times a month, 2.5 hours each time, at $30 an hour. Spread across the weeks of a year, that is $34.62 a week, and $1,800 a year.
- Kitchen equipment servicing — 1 time a quarter, 6 hours each time, at $60 an hour. Spread the same way, that is $27.69 a week, and $1,440 a year.
Part 7, filled in: what the named fixes cost, at the prices in the plan catalog this studio publishes. For the double-booked Saturdays, one shared booking record: Tripleseat, listed at $4,500 a year, with Google Calendar connected, listed at $0 a year, and Acuity Scheduling, listed at $192 a year, to catch Saturday conflicts. For ordering from memory, MarketMan, listed at $2,988 a year. For the group-text swaps, Slack, listed at $87 a year, together with the same Tripleseat record, so changes land on the event sheet. For the retyped invoices and untracked deposits, QuickBooks Online, listed at $456 a year, together with Stripe, which the catalog lists as pay-as-you-go with no annual price, so this page gives it none. The priced fixes the sample names come to $8,223 a year, next to the workflow's own $37,560 a year — fixes with a published price, a workflow with a worked-out cost, and the judgement between them left where it belongs, with the owner.
What to do with a filled-in worksheet
A filled-in worksheet is a decision document, not a report to shelve. Read it back in order. Where a step has no owner, decide who owns it or accept, on paper, that nobody does. Where a block costs more than you expected, argue with its hours and its rate first — if the corrected block still costs that much, the number is telling you something. Where a fix's published price is small next to the blocks its problem sits in, that is a candidate to act on first; where the price is larger than the blocks, the fix needs a different reason to exist. If the signs that led you here are still a suspicion rather than a worksheet, the checklist in these Notes, "Signs your workflows are broken" — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/signs-your-workflows-are-broken — works through the five checkable signs, each shown in this same sample, and ends in the capture this worksheet is built from. And if you would rather watch the method done once before doing yours, the method guide walks through it step by step — that link, and the other worked examples behind this page, are in the next section.
The worked examples behind this page
This worksheet is the blank form of a small set of worked pages in these Notes. The method guide, "How to audit one workflow" — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/how-to-audit-one-workflow — walks through the capture step by step on the same catering workflow, with the arithmetic shown. The teardown, "What a catering workflow costs" — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/what-a-catering-workflow-costs — pulls the sample workflow apart block by block and problem by problem, with every figure checkable against the published sample plan. And the cost guide, "What a workflow audit costs in 2026" — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/what-a-workflow-audit-costs — lays out what it costs to have someone else run the capture for you, rung by rung, at published prices, if filling in the worksheet yourself is not how you want to spend the hours. Read the method guide for the steps, the teardown for the numbers, and the cost guide for the alternative.
Doing this with Where AI Fits
Where AI Fits runs this same capture for one of your workflows: a guided conversation reconstructs the workflow, you confirm the steps, the owners, the exceptions, the hours, and the rates, and the paid AI Integration Plan, at $49, writes up the time and cost block by block, names the problems in your business's own words, and puts a named fix and its catalog price next to each one. The worksheet on this page stays free either way — filling it in yourself is the do-it-yourself version of the same method, and the sample plan used throughout this page is published on this site, so you can check every figure here against the finished document before deciding.
Sources
Every number on this page traces to the studio's own published sample or catalog, checked on 2026-10-30. Taste & Thyme Catering is a synthetic example, labelled as such on the sample plan itself; its figures are the sample's own, not measurements of a real business. No external statistic or price is used on this page.
- Taste & Thyme Catering sample plan — $722.31 a week, $37,560 a year, 18.62 hours a week, the four blocks, and the four named problems — https://www.agenticartists.com/products/where-ai-fits/sample-plan — checked 2026-10-30
- The Wave 4 teardown of the same sample — the four problems in the business's own words and the named fixes with their catalog prices — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/what-a-catering-workflow-costs — checked 2026-10-30
- The Wave 3 method guide — the capture method (steps, owners, exceptions, time, cost) worked step by step, which this worksheet is the blank form of — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/how-to-audit-one-workflow — checked 2026-10-30
- The Wave 11 checklist — the five checkable signs and the capture method this worksheet's fields mirror — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/signs-your-workflows-are-broken — checked 2026-10-30
- The Wave 2 cost guide — https://www.agenticartists.com/blog/what-a-workflow-audit-costs — checked 2026-10-30
- Where AI Fits plan catalog prices, checked against the catalog in this tree on 2026-10-30 — Tripleseat $4,500 a year, Google Calendar $0 a year, Acuity Scheduling $192 a year, MarketMan $2,988 a year, Slack $87 a year, QuickBooks Online $456 a year; Stripe listed as pay-as-you-go with no annual price
- Where AI Fits — $49 for the AI Integration Plan for one workflow, published on this site at /products/where-ai-fits — checked 2026-10-30
Ready to look at one workflow?
Start with the Where AI Fits sample plan, or learn more about the product and its workflow-first approach.