How Automations Free Up
Your Working Week

Where the hours actually go

Most business owners don't realise how much time disappears into tasks that could run automatically. Individually each task seems small. Added up across a week, it's half a working day — or more.

Zapier's 2024 findings — the numbers

Zapier's State of Business Automation 2024 report surveyed thousands of small and medium business owners. Key findings: businesses using automation save an average of 11.5 hours per week, with a median saving of 5 hours. Owners report reclaiming time primarily from email, scheduling, and follow-up workflows.

Separately, Salesforce found workers using automation tools save around 3.6 hours per week — equivalent to 23 full working days per year. Even at the conservative end, that's nearly a month of productive capacity returned to your business annually.

ROI: time is only part of the story

Forrester Research, analysing the impact of Microsoft's Power Automate platform, found a 248% ROI over three years with payback in under six months. A separate Forrester study of Pipefy (published December 2024) found 260% ROI and 40% time savings on automated processes.

These figures come from enterprise deployments, but the underlying math applies equally to small businesses: every hour of manual work that is automated either pays back directly (the owner's time is freed for revenue-generating work) or removes the need for an additional hire.

What gets automated in practice

The highest-impact automations for Estonian SMBs are booking flows (a customer books a service online at any hour, gets a confirmation instantly, gets a reminder the day before), lead qualification (a form submission triggers a follow-up sequence without anyone touching it), and review collection (a satisfied client automatically receives a review request at the right moment).

None of these require complex systems. They require the right tools connected correctly — which is exactly what ZAIS builds.