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Example projects

Seven worked examples of the jobs we take on: what we'd do, what it costs and what to expect.

Please read

These are worked examples of how we'd approach common jobs, not client case studies. Costs use our published prices. Savings are estimates with the working shown, so you can check them against your own numbers. Time is costed at £22.60 an hour (UK median full-time pay plus employer costs) over 46 working weeks.

Example project · Save time · Automation and AI

Supplier invoices read, coded and posted to Xero

The situation
A 40-person wholesaler. Three people key supplier PDFs into Xero by hand, about 15 hours a week between them. Coding lines to the right account depends on who is doing it.
What we'd do
  1. Week 1: the Walkthrough, watching the real process and collecting 100 recent invoices to test against.
  2. Weeks 2 to 4: AI reads each invoice, picks out supplier, date, lines and VAT, classifies each line to a nominal code, and matches it to the purchase order.
  3. Week 5: invoices post to Xero as drafts. Anything the system is unsure about goes to a person to check. Handover and training.
Price and time
Walkthrough £1,950, credited against the Build. Build from £6,500. Running costs around £50 a month.
What to expect
Typically 50 to 70% of the keying removed. 15 hours a week is about £15,600 a year, so that is roughly £7,800 to £10,900 a year back. The Build pays for itself in about 8 to 11 months.
What could change it
Very inconsistent supplier layouts, handwritten notes on invoices, or a chart of accounts that needs tidying first.

Automation and AI · Guide: What does AI automation cost a small business?

Example project · Save time · Automation and AI

Enquiries sorted and replies drafted for approval

The situation
A 30-person lettings agency with a shared inbox taking around 150 emails a day. Two people spend about 20 hours a week reading, forwarding and answering the same kinds of question.
What we'd do
  1. The Walkthrough, sampling a few hundred real emails to see what comes in and how the team replies.
  2. AI sorts each email into repairs, viewings, rent queries and everything else, and flags anything urgent such as leaks or no heating.
  3. It looks up the tenant and property in the CRM and drafts a reply in the team's own style. Nothing is sent until a person approves it.
Price and time
Walkthrough £1,950, credited. Build from £6,500. Running costs around £50 a month.
What to expect
Typically 40 to 60% less time on the inbox. 20 hours a week is about £20,800 a year, so roughly £8,300 to £12,500 a year back, and urgent repairs spotted the minute they arrive. Payback in about 7 to 10 months.
What could change it
Replies that need judgement, out-of-date CRM records, or a team that prefers to write every reply from scratch.

Automation and AI · Guide: What does AI automation cost a small business?

Example project · Save time · Internal tools

The Monday spreadsheet replaced by a live dashboard

The situation
A 45-person distributor. The operations and finance managers spend about 8 hours a week between them pulling numbers from Xero, Shopify and the CRM into a Monday Excel pack. By Wednesday it is out of date.
What we'd do
  1. Agree the ten numbers that matter and exactly how each one is worked out.
  2. Connect Xero, Shopify and the CRM, syncing every night into a small database in your own cloud account.
  3. A browser dashboard with sales, margin, stock cover and overdue invoices, plus a summary email at 7am every Monday.
Price and time
Build from £6,500. Hosting typically around £20 a month in your account.
What to expect
Most of the 8 hours back, worth about £8,300 a year, so payback in roughly 10 months. The bigger win is usually having the numbers every day instead of once a week.
What could change it
Systems that disagree with each other, or numbers nobody has defined the same way twice.

Automation and AI · Guide: Zapier vs Make vs n8n vs a custom build

Example project · Save time · Data feeds

Competitor prices checked daily instead of weekly

The situation
An online retailer has someone checking 200 products across four competitor websites by hand, one day a week. Prices are a week old by the time anyone acts on them.
What we'd do
  1. Check each competitor site's terms and agree the products and fields to collect.
  2. A scheduled feed collects public prices and stock status gently each morning, cleans them and matches them to your product codes.
  3. Results land in a Google Sheet with price gaps highlighted. We monitor the feed and repair it when a site changes.
Price and time
Data feed £2,400 to set up, then £290 a month.
What to expect
The 7.5 hours a week is worth about £7,800 a year. After the £290 a month, that is around £4,300 a year net, and the setup pays back in about 7 months. Prices arrive daily rather than weekly.
What could change it
A competitor whose terms rule out automated collection, or prices only shown after login. We drop those sources rather than work around them.

Data feeds · Guide: Is web scraping legal in the UK?

Example project · Save money · Tech cost review

A $4,000 a month AWS bill reviewed

The situation
A 25-person software company. The AWS bill has crept from $2,500 to $4,000 a month over two years and nobody can say why. Nobody has reviewed it since the account was set up.
What we'd do
  1. Read-only access to billing and usage. Nothing is changed during the review.
  2. Check idle and oversized servers, old volumes and snapshots, logs kept forever, NAT and data transfer charges, Extended Support fees and Savings Plan options.
  3. A costed list of cuts with the saving, effort and risk for each, walked through on a call. We make the changes on a fixed quote if you want.
Price and time
Tech cost review £1,500, with no fee if we find less than that in savings over a year.
What to expect
In an account that has never been reviewed, finding a fifth to a third of the spend is realistic. On $4,000 a month that is roughly $800 to $1,300 a month, or about $9,600 to $15,800 a year. The fee is usually covered within the first two to three months of savings.
What could change it
Accounts already well looked after save less. Some savings, like database upgrades, need testing before they land.

Cost review · Guide: How to cut your AWS bill

Example project · Stay safe · Cyber Essentials

Cyber Essentials Plus for a firm with older kit

The situation
A 60-person firm. A major customer now requires Cyber Essentials Plus. Eight warehouse PCs still run Windows 10, staff read work email on personal phones, and everyone has admin rights.
What we'd do
  1. Gap check against the current Danzell questions, with a costed list of what will fail.
  2. Fix with your team: two-factor logins on every cloud service, separate admin accounts, device management, and a plan for the old PCs.
  3. Complete the self-assessment, then take you through the Plus audit with an accredited certification body.
Price and time
Readiness from £950. Certification fee £500 and the Plus audit (typically £2,000 to £3,000) billed at cost. Replacement PCs bought by you.
What to expect
A first-year total of roughly £8,800 to £10,800 including eight new PCs, most of it one-off. The customer contract kept, and £25,000 of included cyber insurance if turnover is under £20 million.
What could change it
More unsupported devices than expected, or systems that cannot take two-factor logins and need replacing.

Security · Guide: How much does Cyber Essentials cost in 2026?

Example project · Ongoing · Engineer on retainer

An engineer for an agency whose only developer left

The situation
A 25-person agency. Its one developer has just left. Client websites, a couple of internal tools and the hosting all lived in his head, and the passwords are scattered.
What we'd do
  1. First 30 days: recover access, list every system, domain and renewal date, check backups work and close the obvious security gaps.
  2. Days 30 to 60: fix the most urgent problems, write down how everything works, and move hosting into accounts the agency owns.
  3. Days 60 to 90: a costed plan for the next year and a clear answer on whether to hire, and if so who.
Price and time
One day a week embedded, £3,400 a month, with a three month minimum.
What to expect
Everything documented and in the agency's own name, no more single point of failure, and a hiring decision made on facts rather than panic.
What could change it
Systems that were never backed up, or client work promised on deadlines nobody wrote down.

Embedded engineer

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