To talk about process automation in Figueres you have to look at what the town lives on: of the 11,910 general-scheme social security registrations at workplaces in the town, 10,065 are in services, against 1,110 in industry and 700 in construction, according to Idescat. And there are 19,980 people in work out of 22,432 economically active. Services and small companies: nobody has a department watching dates.
Figueres lives on services, and services come with dates
An industrial company has machines that complain when they break. A service company has paperwork, and paperwork makes no noise. The insurance renews itself for another year, the maintenance contract rolls over with an increase, the certificate expires on a Thursday afternoon. None of it breaks down: it simply happens, and you find out afterwards.
What expires in an ordinary business in Figueres
- Insurance on the premises, public liability and the vehicles.
- Supplier contracts, which almost always renew themselves unless you give notice in time.
- Mandatory inspections: extinguishers, installations, measuring equipment.
- Digital certificates for the company and its representative.
- The domain and the hosting of your website, paid once a year.
- Licences and permits, municipal and activity-related.
- Staff contracts: end of probation, temporary contracts, holidays.
None of them is difficult. The problem is that they sit in seven different places and none gets looked at on the same day.
Why one always slips through
Because the reminder arrives by email to an address nobody opens, or because it came eleven months ago and whoever read it thought "I will remember". And because the person who kept it all in their head had a customer in front of them and the phone ringing that day.
On top of that, hardly any of these dates hurt on the day they pass. The insurance still covers you, the website is still up and the contract is still alive: what changes is the price or the small print, and that shows up three months later on an invoice you can no longer argue about.
Memory is not a system
It works until there are twenty dates, and any business with a few years behind it has more than twenty. What is remembered today with effort is forgotten tomorrow through nobody fault: it is not a people problem, it is that there is no place to look it up.
The renewals calendar, the sheet that fixes most of it
The first step is not software. It is a list with every date in the business in one place. It takes an afternoon of emptying the filing cabinet, the inbox and the accountant folder, and it already sorts out more than any tool.
The five fields for every date
What expires, when, who handles it, what it costs and how far ahead you have to move. With those five it can remind you by itself, and without them no automation is worth anything: a reminder with no owner is an email nobody opens.
Who gets the reminder
This detail decides whether the whole thing works. Reminders cannot go to one person private inbox, because the day that person leaves they go with them. They go to a company mailbox, with at least two recipients. Same story as the domain, which we cover in who owns your domain: whoever receives the renewal notice has more power than it looks.
Want to know what it would cost you?
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How far ahead to set the reminder
It depends on what has to happen. If it is only paying, a fortnight is enough. If you have to get three quotes or give notice that you are not renewing, you need two or three months. We set two reminders: a long one to decide and a short one to act.
The day-before reminder is useless, and it is usually the one people set.
The two reminders for each date
The first arrives with room to spare and says what has to be decided: whether to carry on, whether to get another quote, whether something has to be put in writing. The second arrives when there is no time left and says what has to be done today. Separating them is the difference between negotiating and signing whatever is put in front of you, and it costs nothing more than setting both.
The calendar you do not set
Some dates do not depend on your business and arrive anyway: the tax ones. They are published in the taxpayer calendar and your accountant usually handles them, but it is worth keeping them in the same place as your own, if only to avoid closing for a whole week exactly when a filing is due.
What gets automated and what does not
The reminder gets automated, not the decision. The machine remembers, gathers the paperwork and tells the right person; deciding whether to renew, to change supplier or to negotiate stays with a human. It is the same idea we set out in which tasks to automate with artificial intelligence: the repetitive to the machine, the judgement to the person.
What the machine prepares
When a reminder fires, the useful part is not the reminder itself: it is that it arrives with the contract attached, last year amount and the name of whoever signed it. That way the decision takes five minutes instead of being put off another week, which is what happens when everything has to be dug out first.
Start with a list, not with a system
As in every other process automation project, you start small here: one list, one reminder and one owner. Once that has been running for three months you find out what is missing, and it is hardly ever what everyone assumed at the start. The full order is in process automation: where to start.
What happens when someone leaves
This is the acid test. If whoever handles renewals does not come in tomorrow, does anybody know what expires in March? If the answer is that you would have to look in that person inbox, there is no system. The renewals calendar belongs to the company, not to whoever maintains it, the same as the customer list we cover in CRM for small businesses.
One example from Figueres, no names
A service company with two sites. They had fifteen live contracts between rents, insurance, maintenance and utilities, and not one of them in the same place. One year a maintenance contract renewed itself with an increase nobody had looked at, because notice of non-renewal had to go out two months earlier.
We built a list with the fifteen dates, two reminders per date and a shared mailbox. Nothing else. In the first year they renegotiated four contracts, simply because they got there in time to say something.
We'll tell you in a ten-minute conversation
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
The mistakes we see around here
- Putting the reminder in somebody personal calendar, which leaves with that person.
- Reminding without saying what to do. "Renew insurance" is not a task; "get three quotes before the 15th" is.
- Loading fifty dates at once on day one, getting sick of it in two weeks and dropping the whole thing.
- Not writing down the cost, which is what lets you see at a glance what is worth renegotiating.
When process automation in Figueres is needed
- You could not say off the top of your head which contract expires next month.
- Some supplier has renewed itself with an increase nobody saw coming.
- The reminders go to one person email address and only that one.
- Every time a certificate is requested it has to be hunted down in three folders.
The drawer test
Open the drawer or folder where you keep the contracts and answer two questions without checking your email: which one expires next and what does it cost. If it takes more than a minute, there is your job. Nothing else is needed to know it.
What process automation in Figueres costs
There is no price list, and our pricing page says as much: automation, custom software and the artificial intelligence work go per project, with a closed written quote before we start. A renewals calendar with its reminders is one of the smallest jobs we take on.
Only the web and presence side has published prices: 100 € a month for a landing page, 200 € for a website of up to ten subpages and 400, 750 and 1,500 € for the presence plans, plus VAT and with no lock-in. If the website is part of the package too, the local piece is in digital marketing in Figueres and in custom software in Figueres.
How long it takes
The list, one afternoon of yours. The automatic reminders, one to two weeks. After that the only task is adding each new contract the day it gets signed, which takes two minutes, and reviewing it once a month along with the other numbers. Website checks belong in the same box: they are in what website maintenance covers.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, half an hour from Figueres
We drive up when it needs seeing in person and handle the rest remotely. Tell us how many live contracts you have and where they are written down, and we will tell you whether something needs building or whether tidying up what you already have is enough, which happens more often than people expect.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.