AI audit cost for a business: £3,000, and what it covers

What does the audit cover?

The audit is the first stage of how we work, and it looks at three things.

• How the business runs. The path an enquiry, an order or a client takes from first contact to finished work, and who touches it at each step.
• The tools you use. Every system, subscription and spreadsheet involved, and whether they pass information to each other or rely on someone retyping it.
• Where work gets stuck. The steps where things wait, get done twice or get dropped.

The output is a written report. It is a document you keep, and it is the basis for the written scope if you decide to build.

The fee does not buy software, a build or a support plan. Those are priced separately, after the report. The full sequence is on our approach page.

Where the audit sits among the other costs

The audit is one of four things you might pay for, and only one of them is fixed in advance.

Running costs for anything built, such as hosting, software and AI usage, are a fifth line. You pay those to the providers from your own accounts, and they are not part of our fees.

How the 14-day credit works

1. You pay for the audit in full. There are no stage payments on the audit.
2. We deliver the written report. The 14-day window opens on the day you receive it.
3. You decide whether to build. If you go ahead, we agree a written scope with a fixed price. Builds are paid 50% upfront and 50% on launch.
4. You pay the build deposit inside the window. The audit fee is then credited against the build price.

If the deposit is paid after the window closes, there is no credit and the audit fee stands as paid. A report describes your business as it is now, and it dates quickly.

Do not let the credit rush you. If you need longer to decide, take longer and treat the audit as a cost in its own right. That is the honest way to judge whether it is worth it.

What can you do with the report if you do not build with us?

The report is yours whatever you decide. There are three sensible uses for it.

• Hand it to your own team. Some of what an audit finds needs no new software. A duplicated step or an unused subscription can be fixed in house.
• Take it to another developer. A written account of how the business runs and where it gets stuck is the hard half of any brief. Our guide on hiring someone to build an AI system covers what to ask them.
• Use it to decide the order. If budget only allows one fix this year, the report tells you which stuck point costs the most. See what to automate first in a service business.

The only thing you lose by not building with us is the credit.

When an audit is not worth paying for

The audit is the wrong purchase for some businesses. Hold on to your money if:

• you have not taken the free scorecard. The Business Systems Scorecard is sixteen questions and costs nothing. Do it first. If it points to one obvious gap, you may not need more;
• you have one small, well-defined problem. If you need a booking page or a single form connected to a spreadsheet, a ready-made tool will do it for less than the audit;
• the way you work is still changing. A new business that reshapes its process every month will outgrow the report before acting on it;
• nobody has time to take part. We need the people who do the work to show us how it is done, and access to the tools. Without that, the report is guesswork;
• you are not going to change anything this year. An audit with no decision at the end of it is an expensive read.

If any of these apply, we will say so on the first call.

Why the audit comes before any fixed price

We do not quote an exact build price before an audit. We give a range. A fixed figure quoted from one conversation is a guess, and a guess is either padded to cover the unknowns or too low and corrected later with change requests.

The cost of a build sits in details nobody mentions on a first call: which systems must be connected, who is allowed to see what, and where a person has to approve something. The audit finds those. The scope that follows names the systems, integrations, permissions and success measures, and the price is fixed against it.

TMMB Academy is a published example of that starting point. It came to us with fragmented funnel and operating processes, rising software subscriptions and no single system, and the answer was one portal in place of many tools. Read the TMMB Academy case study.

How to get the most from the fee

1. List every tool and what you pay for it. Include the ones only one person uses. Our post on the cost of disconnected business tools shows what to look for.
2. Name one person per process. We want whoever does the job each day, not the person who designed it.
3. Collect real examples. Five recent enquiries followed from start to finish tell us more than a flowchart.
4. Arrange access before day one. Read access to the systems means the 10 working days are spent on your business, not on waiting for logins.
5. Decide what a good outcome means. Fewer hours on admin, faster replies or fewer subscriptions. Pick one, so the report can be judged against it.