How to audit one workflow

Most workflow audits go wrong before they start, because they try to audit the whole business at once. Every process, every person, every tool. The document that comes out is long, general, and hard to act on, and the owner shelves it. Audit one workflow instead. One workflow has a start and an end, a small number of steps, and a cost you can actually add up. This is the method, worked through a single example from start to finish.

The example is Taste & Thyme Catering, a synthetic example business whose sample plan is published on this site. Its weekly catering operations workflow — from a booking coming in to the invoice going out — is the one workflow being audited here. Every number below comes from that published sample, and the Sources section says where each one lives.

Step 1 — Name the workflow and where it starts and ends

Write one sentence: the workflow, where it starts, and where it stops. For the catering example: 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. If you cannot write that sentence, the workflow is still too big. Split it until the sentence is easy. Auditing "the business" fails this test. Auditing "how bookings become staffed, supplied events" passes it.

Step 2 — Write the steps as they actually happen

List the steps in the order they happen, not the order they are supposed to happen. For each step, write who does it, what they touch while they do it, and where the work waits when they stop. In the catering workflow, bookings live in two places at once — a spreadsheet and a paper calendar — ingredients are ordered from memory, shift swaps are agreed in a group text, and invoices are retyped by hand. None of that is a criticism. It is the workflow, written honestly, and an audit that skips it will price a workflow nobody actually runs.

Write down the exceptions too, in the words you would use at work: the swap that never reached the event sheet, the Saturday that got booked twice, the deposit nobody wrote down. Exceptions are not edge cases. In a manual workflow they are usually where the cost is.

Step 3 — Attach time to each block of work

Group the steps into blocks of work done by one person at one pace, and for each block write three things: how long it takes, how often it happens, and the rate for the person doing it, confirmed by the owner rather than guessed. The catering workflow, priced this way, has 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.

Notice what this step does not need: an industry average, a benchmark, or a guess about businesses like yours. The hours and the rates are the business's own, stated by the people who do the work, and they can be checked against a real week.

Step 4 — Add it up, and check the total with the owner

Add the blocks. The catering workflow takes 18.62 hours a week. The weekly lines add to $722.31 a week; the yearly lines add to $37,560 a year. That total is the audit's first real finding: not a feeling that the workflow is heavy, but a number the owner has seen built up block by block and can argue with, block by block, if any line is wrong. An audit total the owner does not recognise is worth nothing, however careful the arithmetic. Show the working, let the owner correct the hours and the rates, and re-add it. The corrected total is the one you decide with.

Step 5 — Name the problems, in the words the business uses

With the steps and the time in front of you, the problems usually name themselves — and they should be written the way the business talks about them, not translated into consultant language. The catering audit names four:

• Double-booked Saturdays, because the booking record lives in a spreadsheet and on a paper calendar, and the two drift apart.
• Ordering from memory, which produces ingredient shortages on some days and overbuys on others — the same problem seen from two sides.
• 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.
• Invoices retyped by hand, and deposits nobody tracks, in the workflow's own records.

Each problem sits inside specific steps of the workflow, which is what makes the next step possible. A problem named against the whole business can be priced only with a guess. A problem named against specific blocks can be priced with the audit's own numbers: the cost of the time in the blocks it touches.

Step 6 — Put the price of a fix next to the cost of the problem

For each problem, look for a fix whose published price you can write down, and put that price next to the cost of the problem. Do not promise what the fix will save. The honest comparison is simpler: this problem's time costs this much a year, and this fix costs that much a year. In the plan catalog this studio publishes, a shared calendar through Google Calendar is listed at $0 a year, MarketMan for ordering is listed at $2,988 a year, Slack is listed at $87 a year, and QuickBooks Online is listed at $456 a year. Whether a fix at one of those prices is worth buying depends on the cost of the blocks it touches in your workflow — which is exactly what Steps 3 and 4 gave you. A fix that costs more than the time it touches needs a different reason to exist, and an audit that shows both numbers lets you see that before you pay, not after.

What one workflow will not tell you

This method prices one workflow. It will not tell you whether your other workflows are healthy, it will not interview your whole team, and it does not build any fix for you. That narrowness is the point. One workflow, audited honestly, gives you a document you can act on this week and a method you can repeat on the next workflow yourself. If the problem turns out to be the whole business, that is what a wider, more expensive audit is for — the cost guide in these Notes, "What a workflow audit costs in 2026", lays out what those wider audits are published at.

Doing this with Where AI Fits

Where AI Fits runs this same method as a guided conversation: it reconstructs one workflow with the owner, the owner confirms the draft — the steps, the hours, the rates — and the paid AI Integration Plan, at $49, writes up the time and cost block by block, names the problems, and puts a named fix and its catalog price next to each problem. The sample plan for the catering workflow used throughout this guide is published on this site, so you can read the finished document before deciding whether the method is worth paying for.

Sources

Every number in this guide traces to the studio's own published sample or catalog, checked on 2026-10-29. 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.

• Taste & Thyme Catering sample plan — $722.31 a week, $37,560 a year, 18.62 hours a week, the four named problems, and the four time blocks (5 hours at $60, 12 hours at $30, the deep-clean at 2 times a month for 2.5 hours at $30, equipment servicing at 1 time a quarter for 6 hours at $60) — https://www.agenticartists.com/products/where-ai-fits/sample-plan — checked 2026-10-29
• Where AI Fits plan catalog prices, as published in the shipped catalog — Google Calendar $0 a year, MarketMan $2,988 a year, Slack $87 a year, QuickBooks Online $456 a year — checked against the catalog on 2026-10-29
• Where AI Fits — $49 for the AI Integration Plan for one workflow, published on this site at /products/where-ai-fits — checked 2026-10-29

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