| Cost | Free. There is no charge and no obligation to buy anything afterwards. |
|---|---|
| Format | On-site at your premises, or remotely by video call. |
| Typical length | 45 to 90 minutes, depending on how many processes we walk through. |
| Area served | Ireland. Oxus is based on Greenhills Road, Walkinstown, Dublin 12. |
| You receive | A written summary of where your admin time goes and what can be automated. |
| Next step | An optional fixed-fee solution blueprint. You decide whether to proceed. |
What the operational audit is
The operational audit is a free, structured review of how your business runs day to day. Oxus Technologies carries it out before proposing any work, because the cost of a bad automation project is almost always a misunderstanding of the process it was meant to replace.
Most Irish SMEs do not have a software problem. They have an accumulation problem. A spreadsheet was created to solve something in 2019, a second system was bought in 2022, and the gap between them has been bridged ever since by somebody re-typing things. Nobody decided to work that way. It simply happened, one reasonable decision at a time.
The audit makes that visible. We sit with the people who actually do the admin, follow a real job or order from the moment it arrives to the moment it is paid, and write down every point where a human moves information from one place to another by hand.
What we look for
Every business is different, but the same patterns turn up again and again:
- Double entry. The same customer, job or invoice typed into two or more systems because those systems do not talk to each other.
- Spreadsheets used as databases. A shared workbook that several people edit, with no history of who changed what, and no way to stop two people editing at once.
- Dates living in someone's head. Insurance renewals, certificate expiries, licence dates and contract end dates that are remembered rather than tracked, and occasionally forgotten.
- Paper that becomes typing. Forms filled in on site, driven back to an office, and typed into a computer by a second person.
- WhatsApp as a system of record. Decisions, photographs and job details that exist only in a chat thread nobody can search six months later.
- Month-end reconstruction. Several days spent each month rebuilding what happened from receipts, messages and memory, because nothing was captured as it occurred.
None of these are signs of a badly run business. They are what happens when a business grows faster than the systems holding it together.
What happens during the audit
1. We walk the process, not the org chart
We ask you to pick one thing your business does repeatedly, and we follow it end to end. A delivery. A job. An order. An invoice. Whatever your business runs on.
2. We count the handoffs
Every time information changes hands or changes format, that is a point where time is lost and errors get introduced. We count them, and we note which ones a computer could do instead.
3. We ask what breaks
The most useful question in any audit is what goes wrong when someone is out sick. Processes that depend entirely on one person knowing something are the ones worth fixing first.
4. We tell you what we found
You get a written summary: where the admin hours are going, which of them can be automated, and roughly what each would involve. It is written in plain English, not in technical language.
What the audit is not
It is not a sales presentation with a report attached. It is not a generic "digital transformation" assessment scored against a maturity model. And it does not commit you to anything.
Oxus makes money by building things that work and then maintaining them, which means we have no interest in recommending a build that will not pay for itself. Several audits end with us saying that a particular process is not worth automating yet. That is a legitimate outcome.
What it leads to
If there is work worth doing, the audit leads into the rest of our engagement blueprint: a fixed-fee solution blueprint document, then a fixed-price build, then an optional retainer that keeps the automation running and maintained. You will know what we found and exactly what we would build before you commit to anything.
Depending on what the audit turns up, the build itself is usually one of three things: business process automation, systems integration between tools you already own, or custom software where nothing off the shelf fits.
Frequently asked questions
Is the operational audit really free?
Yes. The operational audit costs nothing and carries no obligation. Oxus offers it free because it is also how we work out whether we can genuinely help you. If the honest answer is that your processes are already fine, or that an off-the-shelf tool would solve your problem more cheaply than anything we would build, we will tell you that.
What happens after the audit?
You receive a written summary of what we found. If there is something worth building, we offer a solution blueprint: a comprehensive three-page document mapping out the automated database layout and pipeline we would build for you. Only after you have read the blueprint and agreed a fixed price does any build start. You can stop at any stage.
How long does the audit take?
Most operational audits take between 45 and 90 minutes. Businesses with several disconnected systems, or with processes spread across multiple sites, sometimes take longer. We will tell you in advance if we think yours will.
Do you come to our premises?
We do. Oxus is based in Dublin 12 and works with businesses across Ireland. Seeing the work happen in person is usually more revealing than any description of it, because the manual workarounds people have built up are often invisible to the person doing them. Where travel is impractical, we run the audit by video call instead.
What do we need to prepare?
Nothing formal. It helps if the person who actually does the admin is in the room, rather than only the owner or manager, because they know where the real friction is. If you can show us a recent example of a job or order moving through the business from start to finish, that is usually enough.
We already use software. Is the audit still useful?
Often more useful. Businesses that already run several systems are the ones most likely to be re-typing the same data between them. Those gaps between tools are exactly what an audit is looking for, and connecting existing systems is usually cheaper than replacing them. See systems integration.