About
Where the numbers come from
Every score on this site is taken from one research document, version 1.0, dated 22 August 2026. Nothing is calculated here that the document did not state, and nothing is rounded differently from the way the document rounds it.
The three numbers
Time released
Typical potential to release owner or staff time, cut delay and rework, or add capacity if the area is materially improved.
Financial upside
Typical potential to improve revenue, margin, cash or cost efficiency — or avoid material loss — relative to the resources required.
Automation potential
How much of the recurring work, monitoring, analysis or execution can typically be automated or AI-augmented, with appropriate controls.
What these numbers are not
They are structured benchmark judgements about typical cross-business opportunity. They are not guaranteed returns, not forecasts, and never a particular business’s own result. What you actually get depends on your industry, size, current maturity, transaction volume, labour cost, margins, system readiness, risk and how well the work is done.
The research deliberately refuses to pre-score how critical any area is, on the grounds that criticality has to be assessed against an individual business and cannot be responsibly assigned in advance. That is the gap the audit fills: you supply the half about your business, and the ranking comes from putting the two together.
The arithmetic
A major category’s score is the sum of its sub-category scores. A general category’s score is the sum of its major categories. Across the whole framework that is 1847/2780 for time, 2229/2780 for financial and 2043/2780 for automation.
Averages appear alongside the sums only so categories containing different numbers of sub-categories can be compared fairly. They never replace the sum, and they are the document’s own stated averages rather than recalculated ones — where a recalculation would round differently, the research wins.
The written guidance
The explanations and automation advice attached to each of the 278 sub-categories are ours, not the research document’s. The document scores; it does not explain. The guidance is written for an owner rather than a consultant, and it is deliberately honest about the areas where automation does not help — culture, trust, succession and leadership continuity score low for automation potential for good reasons, and the advice says so rather than inventing tooling for problems that are not tooling problems.