Questions to ask before hiring a firm to automate your workflows

Walk away from any firm that starts coding in week one, because it is guessing at a process it has never watched. Request a sample map from an earlier job, with swim lanes, forms, hand-offs and delays marked, as a PDF or BPMN file you can open yourself. That file survives a change of vendor.

Good mapping happens at the desk. A clerk who re-keys a delivery note into the stock register knows steps the owner has never seen, like the phone call that releases a held credit note. Ask who they will interview. Expect the vendor to sit beside a dispatch clerk for half a day and watch a real order travel from enquiry to invoice, including every workaround nobody wrote down.

Insist that the map ends with a signed list of steps to change, keep or merge, because that list becomes your yardstick at user acceptance testing. No signature, no build.

Automation is a set of rules. Who approves an order above the limit? Which supplier needs a second bank check? What triggers the overdue reminder? Ask where those rules are stored and who may change them, then write the owner’s name beside each rule on a sheet the process head keeps. Review it every quarter, since staffing changes.

Some builds bury the rules inside Python scripts or webhook handlers that only the vendor can edit, so every change becomes a paid ticket. Others keep limits, approver names and reminder gaps in a settings table that your own administrator can open, with every edit stamped by user and date.

Whose login is it? Flows built in the vendor’s Zapier, Power Automate or Make account can vanish the day the contract ends, along with the API keys and OAuth tokens inside them. Have the vendor show the login behind each automation and give you written confirmation that you can reset its password without asking the vendor.

Your workflow will touch an accounting package, the WhatsApp Business API, a shared mailbox and perhaps a bank statement file in CSV. Each one will change a field name, a rate limit or a template rule without asking you, and a rejected message template stops the reminders you depend on. A report export gains a column. A login moves to two-step verification. Name every tool in the agreement, one by one, so the vendor cannot later claim a given connection was never part of the scope.

Ask how the vendor learns that a connection has broken, because silent failure means sales orders stop reaching the dispatch queue and nobody on your side knows why.

Look for uptime monitoring, an alert to a named person and a stated time to repair, then write all three into the agreement. A sensible clause names the alert recipient, the hours of cover and a repair time for each connection, and states what happens if a repair runs late.

Every approval needs a name, a time stamp and the version of the purchase order or expense claim that was approved. Ask to see the audit log screen. If an auditor asks who cleared a purchase order last March, the answer should take one minute, and the same screen should show who changed a rule and when. A raised limit leaves a trail.

Then ask about exceptions. Every rule will meet a rush order, a missing GRN or a customer with two billing entities, and the vendor should say what the system does.

The honest answer is that some cases go to a named person with the full context attached, so be wary of any promise that every case runs untouched. It buries errors in the ledger.

Handover is a package, not a meeting. Expect the process maps, the rule list, the admin manual, a staging copy for approval-chain tests, a screen recording for each role and a register of connected accounts. Date it in the contract. Withhold the final payment until you have opened every item yourself and confirmed that each one matches the list in the contract.

Learn what a typical support call costs in time, not in promises, and find out who answers when the engineer who built your flow has left the firm. A vendor with a single builder and no written documentation is a risk you carry, and the quoted price does nothing to reduce it.

Before you decide, phone one of their references and ask a single question: what broke in the first month, and how fast was it fixed?