It's half past six and nobody has got up
It's the twenty-seventh of the month, the printer has run out of paper twice, on the desk there's a pile of documents that wasn't there yesterday, and the same two people who on the fifteenth were leaving at six are still sitting there tonight opening attachments and retyping numbers into the business software
Nobody did anything wrong, the work all arrived at once
The curious thing about work peaks is that they're no surprise, you know them by heart, the month-end close, the tax deadline, the goods receipt at the end of the week, the stocktake, and yet every time they catch you in the same position
In a peak it isn't the heads that run short, it's the hands
When the office holds its breath it isn't because the skill has run out, the people who work there know perfectly well what to do, they've been doing it for years, they spot the odd document straight away and they know who to call when an amount doesn't add up
What runs out is the sheer time for the mechanical part, open the file, look for the number, copy it into the right field, save, move on to the next
And in the busy stretches that part doesn't grow in quality, it only grows in quantity, it's the same movements multiplied by three, and they're exactly the ones that eat your evening
This explains why hiring for the peak works so poorly, the new person arrives when things are at their messiest, they have to be trained on precisely the days when nobody has time to train them, and by the time they start being useful the peak has gone
The overtime sum you can do on your own
If you want to know what a busy stretch really costs you, don't look at the effort, look at the hours
Let's say, just to show the reasoning and not because these are anybody's real numbers, that over the five days of the close two people each do two extra hours. That's twenty hours that weren't there before, every month, and they have to be multiplied by the hourly cost to the company, not by the take-home pay
You can do the sum in two minutes on the Work out the savings page, putting in only the peak hours and the days it happens on, though, not those of an ordinary month
The number that comes out can surprise you, not because it's inflated, but because nobody had ever written those hours down anywhere
An automation doesn't watch the clock
An automation can run at eleven at night or at five in the morning, take the documents that came in during the day, read them, open the screens of your business software the way an operator would, fill in the fields and stop on the cases that don't add up, setting them aside
So the next morning your people don't find the pile, they find the part already entered and a small group of exceptions to look at calmly, which is exactly the work they're paid for
And it works even if the program you use has no direct integration, no API, no official way of getting data in from outside, because the automation uses it from the front, from the same screens you use. It's what Muffin Suite does best, and the page on programs with no integrations covers it in full
The honest question is what your peak is made of
There's an awkward thing to say here, though, not all peaks are alike
If your five days of fire are made of data entry, cross-checks and carrying figures from a file into a screen, then there's a great deal to take away, and it's the case where an automation makes the most sense of all, precisely because the volume is concentrated
If instead your peak is made of phone calls, decisions, negotiations, cases that have to be weighed one by one, an automation is of little use, and whoever tells you otherwise is selling you something
In most offices the two sit together and the line has to be found, so look at your last close and ask yourself how many of those hours were movements you could have explained to anyone in five minutes
That's the part that can be automated, the rest is your trade and it stays yours
Where you start
You don't need a big project to work it out, you need to see which program you use, which steps a person goes through from beginning to end on the busy days, and how many operations there are in those days
If the extra work stays on your back outside the peaks as well, that's a different matter, and you'll find it in the guide on handling more work with the same staff