What Is Business Process Automation and Where Should Your Business Start?

The same invoice gets entered manually, the same report gets built in Excel, and the same client onboarding emails get sent one by one. Business process automation (BPA) is the term for using technology to handle that repeatable work automatically so your team can spend more time on the work that genuinely needs human thinking. 

That shift is already underway. Recent Gallup data found that half of all employees now use AI at work in some form, while 65% say it has had a positive impact on their productivity [1]. Automation and AI are becoming standard operational tools across businesses of all sizes. And as Peter Drucker observed, only two things truly matter in a business: marketing and innovation. BPA takes care of the rest, freeing up the time and budget to focus on exactly that. 

In this article, we go over all what business process automation is all about, and try to explain the operational and business side of things and the best practices that can help you stay ahead of the competition. 

What is Business Process Automation (BPA)? 

Business process automation (BPA) means using technology to carry out repetitive, rule-based tasks automatically, without a human completing them manually each time. The key word here is repetitive. If a task follows the same steps every time it happens, there is a strong chance it can be automated. 

Business process automation means technology does the repetitive work, so your team can focus on the work that actually needs a human resource. 

It helps to separate automation from software more broadly. All automation uses software, but not all software is automation. The distinction is whether a human has been removed from a repeated action. Your accounting platform is software. An invoice that arrives, gets read, gets matched to a purchase order, and gets filed without anyone touching it is automation. 

The same logic applies across functions. In marketing, for instance, a Google Ads campaign can now manage its own budget allocations, adjust keywords and optimise bids based on live performance data. The need for someone doing that manually day-to-day is significantly reduced.  

The one caveat is setup. Get the foundations wrong, and the automation will compound the mistakes rather than fix them. 

It is also worth saying what business process automation is not. It’s not AI replacing jobs across your business overnight. It is not something reserved for large enterprises with IT departments. And it does not require a technical team to implement, as long as you work with people who can do the engineering for you. 

“Take accounts payable: an invoice comes in, the system scans it, checks it against the purchase order, and if it’s below a threshold, it just pays automatically. Historically, a person did every one of those steps by hand.” 

Arun Mehra, CEO Samera Group 

Why Businesses are Automating and What has Changed 

Business process automation is not an entirely new idea, and businesses have been automating processes for decades. What has changed in the last three to four years is the cost, the accessibility, and the power of the tools available. 

“The real shift in the last two or three years is access or the demorcatisation of AI. Free, open AI tools have given businesses a push to actually think about automation and get serious.” 

Deepak Madolia, Senior Manager, GCC & Offshoring 

Three shifts in particular have made this a different conversation in 2026: 

• First, AI tools that were once the preserve of large technology companies are now genuinely affordable and available to businesses of any size.
• Second, the engineering talent needed to build automations is accessible through models that did not exist before, including dedicated AI engineers based in India working directly inside UK client teams.  
• Third, the tools themselves, from Python scripting and RPA platforms to large language models, have become far more capable and far easier to connect to each other. 

There is also a cost to not automating that is easy to overlook.  

Invoice processing is a good example. Manual invoice processing still costs businesses around $9 to $15 per invoice, while automated invoice processing often reduces that to around $3 to $5 per invoice [2]. For businesses processing hundreds or thousands of invoices each month, that difference becomes material very quickly.  

“In the UK, you could hire a team member and pay rising National Insurance and taxes. Flipside, you could build an AI agent. Those costs don’t go up. That matters to a business owner.” 

Arun Mehra, CEO Samera Group 

The competitive gap between businesses that automate and those that do not is becoming more visible. One business might need three extra people to handle growth, while another business handles the same increase with better systems. 

Which Business Processes can Actually be Automated 

One of the most common barriers to starting is that business owners are not sure what counts as an automatable process. The answer is broader than most people expect.  

“There are repetitive roles where people simply aren’t interested anymore. If you can’t recruit for it, you automate it, and honestly, the output is often better.” 

Deepak Madolia, Senior Manager, GCC & Offshoring 

Here are the categories that come up most frequently in practice. 

Data entry and data transfer 

Moving information from one system to another is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone tasks in most businesses. Invoices being keyed into accounting software, client details being copied from a form into a CRM, data being pulled from one platform and entered into another. All of this can be automated. 

Document processing 

Reading, extracting, and acting on information inside documents is increasingly automatable, even with unstructured content like contracts, application forms, and compliance submissions. Systems can be built to read a document, pull out the relevant data, and route it appropriately without human involvement. 

Reporting and analytics 

A report that requires someone to pull data from multiple systems, format it, and send it out is a strong automation candidate. These reports can be set to generate automatically at whatever frequency you need, pulling live data from your existing tools. 

Client onboarding 

The sequence of emails, forms, system setups, and checks that happen every time a new client starts is almost always rule-based. That makes it one of the best places to start, particularly for professional services firms where onboarding volume is high and inconsistency is costly. 

Compliance and regulatory processes 

Checklists, reminders, scheduled submissions, and audit trails that operate on a fixed cycle can be automated to trigger, complete, and log themselves without manual intervention. 

Communication and follow-up 

Automated messages triggered by specific events, a new enquiry, a missed payment, an upcoming appointment, ensure consistent communication without relying on someone remembering to send them. 

Approval workflows 

Routing requests through the right people in the right order, with automatic reminders and escalations, removes a significant amount of manual chasing and ensures nothing gets stuck. 

How Business Process Automation Works 

You do not need to understand the engineering behind to get value from automation. But having a rough mental model of how the technology works makes it easier to have a productive conversation with an engineer and to ask the right questions about what is possible. 

The key point is that automation still needs to be implemented thoughtfully.  

Research from Zapier found that employees spend an average of 4.5 hours per week correcting or redoing poor AI-generated outputs [3]. The lesson is not that automation does not work. It is that businesses need well-designed workflows, clear processes, and the right engineering support rather than simply layering AI onto broken systems. 

“Sometimes people try to automate a process that doesn’t actually need automating. So the first question is: what’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? Are you reducing costs? Speeding something up? Understanding that first is everything.” 

Arun Mehra, CEO Samera Group 

There are three layers to most automation systems.  

1. The first is robotic process automation, or RPA. These are software bots that mimic what a human does on a screen, clicking, copying, pasting, filling in fields. They are particularly useful when you need to connect systems that do not have an API. 
2. The second layer is AI and machine learning, which adds the ability to interpret unstructured information, recognise patterns, and make decisions rather than just follow a fixed script.  
3. The third layer is integration tools, which are connectors that allow different software systems to share data and trigger actions in each other. 

In most real-world automations, all three layers work together. A bot might pull data from an email, an AI layer interprets what the email is asking for, and an integration sends the appropriate response or routes the task to the right system.  

For an owner, what matters most is the clarity around the problem they want to solve. The technicalities of these layers can be entrusted with an AI engineer. 

“Engineering is all about experimentation. Most things will fail, but the one that flies will change everything. And for the right process, you can see that return in weeks and months, not years!” 

Arun Mehra, CEO Samera Group 

Where to Start? How to Identify Best Automation Opportunities 

The most common mistake businesses make when approaching automation is starting with the most impressive-sounding project rather than the most painful one. The most valuable first automation is almost always the one that removes the most friction from your team’s week, not the one that looks best in a board presentation. 

A useful framework for identifying strong first candidates uses three criteria. The process should be high frequency, meaning it happens often. It should be rule-based, meaning it follows the same steps every time with no meaningful variation. And it should be time-consuming, meaning it takes real human hours to complete each time it runs. 

“Before any engineering happens, we have to understand two things. First, how critical is this process to the workflow? Second, is it actually feasible to automate? Our technical leads look at whether a solution already exists. If it does, the work is straightforward. If it does not, that is when we talk about what building something would involve. That’s how we do it at Samera.” 

Deepak Madolia, Senior Manager, GCC & Offshoring 

A practical exercise worth doing this week is asking every member of your team to write down the three tasks they spend the most time on that follow the same pattern every time. The overlap between those answers will show you exactly where to start. In almost every business that does this exercise, the same two or three processes come up repeatedly. 

Different industries often have different starting points: 

• Accountancy firms often begin with client onboarding, report generation, bookkeeping workflows, and document requests.
• Dental groups and DSOs often begin with associate pay calculations, patient data processing, and appointment reminders.
• PE-backed businesses often begin with portfolio reporting, compliance tracking, and management information.
• Startups often begin with invoice processing, lead qualification, and sales follow-up. 

It is equally important to know what not to automate first. Avoid: 

• Processes that depend heavily on human judgement.
• Sensitive financial, legal, or clinical decisions.
• Inconsistent processes that change every time.
• Workflows that are unclear, undocumented, or already broken.

“My advice to any business owner thinking about automation for the first time is to spend an hour with your team asking one question: what do you do that feels like it should not need a person? The answers will be more useful than any technology audit. Start there, get that working reliably, and everything else follows.” 

Arun Mehra, CEO Samera Group 

Two Ways to get Automation Working in your Business 

Once you have identified a process worth automating, the next question is how to actually get it done. There are two practical routes available to most businesses today, and the right one depends on your situation rather than on any universal rule. 

Done for you 

In a done-for-you model, an AI engineering team audits your workflows, designs the automation, builds it, tests it, and hands it over to your team. You describe the problem clearly. They build the solution. This works well when you have a specific, well-defined process to automate and you want it delivered quickly without building any internal technical capability. 

Hire under you 

In a dedicated engineer model, a skilled AI engineer is placed directly inside your team and builds automations under your direction. You own all the intellectual property. You direct the work. The engineer is embedded in your business and develops a deep understanding of how your operations run. This makes more sense when you have multiple processes to automate over time and you want to build ongoing AI capability inside your business rather than depending on external projects. 

Many businesses start with a done-for-you engagement to get their first automation live quickly, then move to a dedicated engineer model once they can see the value and want to build on it continuously. 

“A one-off project automates a single process. The engineer finishes it, hands it over, and moves on. But if an AI engineer is embedded in your team, the learnings from that first process can be implemented across other processes too. You start thinking bigger. You build a longer term plan. And the value does not stop at one fix.”

Deepak Madolia, Senior Manager, GCC & Offshoring 

Samera offers both models through its India-based AI engineering team. If you are not sure which approach suits your business, a quick call with the team is usually enough to give you a clear answer. 

Frequently Asked Questions about Business Process Automation 

About the Author

Rajat Kumar

Rajat is a finance and marketing professional with years of proven experience working in finance and investment KPOs.

Working with Samera’s business development experts, he specialises in creating tips, reports and articles helping accountants understand the global landscape, strategise and grow their business.

Co-authored by

Arun Mehra

Samera CEO

Arun, CEO of Samera, specialises in building global accounting businesses.

Arun is a recognized authority on offshoring and Global Capability Centres (GCCs), having built a global team with locations in the UK and India. He helps other accounting firms leverage offshoring to access global talent, improve efficiency, and future-proof their operations.

Follow Arun on LinkedIn

Deepak Madolia

Senior Training & Development Manager

With an MBA in Finance & Accounts, Deepak has over 10 years of experience in the finance and accounting sector. He started his career in India’s IT industry before moving into KPO, where he managed teams and worked with clients in the UK and Australia across the accounting, dental, and construction sectors.

His expertise includes accounting offshoring, taxation, and team development, and he currently works as a Senior Manager at Samera India, where he oversees training, development, and GCC setup projects.

Follow Deepak on LinkedIn