Aurum Book your Valuation

Your best people are doing your software's job.

If you're reading this, you already suspect the fix is automation. You just haven't found a version of it that doesn't mean throwing out what you've built. Aurum works inside the tools you already run, with nothing replaced.

Win back measurable hours in 60 days, or we keep working until you do, at no extra cost.

Book your free Valuation A 30-minute call, then a written report within five working days. No obligation.
3–4 weeksto a first live automation
60 daysto measurable hours back, or we keep working
Fixedscope and price, agreed before work starts
Our clients
Full Shield Security Lock It Leave It Angler Digital

Your systems don't talk. Someone has to.

Most growing operations have the same problem: work that should run itself is running through people. Someone re-types data between two systems that were never connected. Someone else builds the same report by hand every Monday, from the same three tabs. Someone is spending their best hours on these tasks, instead of the work only they can do.

The work itself is simple, and it is costing teams that are already stretched thin. Automation can take it off them in weeks, with no new hire.

We'll fix it eventually.
The standing plan for that one spreadsheet everyone needs and nobody owns.
£12,034

The average estimated yearly cost of manual admin and data entry, per employee, across two independent UK studies. It is the number we built Aurum to erase.

Dragonflytech, benchmarked to ONS pay data, 2026; IDC's "The Cost of Inaction" research for Kantata, 2026
11 hrs a week

The average time UK small business owners spend on admin and finance tasks alone, nearly twice what they spend on sales and growth.

Amex SME Business Barometer, 2026
Your numbers

What's it actually costing you?

Typical figures are filled in. Change them to yours and see what a year of manual work adds up to.

You
Your team
Estimated annual cost, allowing for review

That is what the time costs today. Whether it's a small leak or one worth fixing is your call.

Estimated annual cost, allowing for review: £49,680, 2,245 hours. Your time £20,240, 405 hours. Your team's time £29,440, 1,840 hours.

A deliberately cautious estimate. Nothing you enter is stored or sent.

How this is worked out

Weekly hours × hourly rate, for you and for each member of staff, × 46 working weeks × 0.8. The 0.8 is a deliberate allowance, so the figure does not overstate the problem, and you should expect it to sit below published averages. It also factors in the time most businesses sensibly allocate to reviewing outputs. This figure is illustrative and not a guaranteed saving, yet it estimates the financial leak our systems aim to erase. Rates are the figures you enter, and exclude employer National Insurance and pension. It also excludes current errors, rework and opportunity cost - you'll know those better than we do. The 11 hours a week we start you at is the average UK small business owners spend on admin and finance tasks alone (Amex SME Business Barometer, 2026). 46 working weeks is 52 less the statutory 5.6 weeks' holiday, rounded down (GOV.UK).

That's £49,680 a year, and 2,245 hours, you don't have to keep losing. We built Aurum to win it back.

Book your free Valuation

Two disciplines, applied deep.

Everything Aurum builds sits inside one of these two disciplines. That focus is what lets each automation go all the way into the tools you already run.

Custom AI integrations

AI, inside what you already use.

We wire AI into the CRM, inbox and internal tools your team already uses. If your team lives in it today, that's where the automation goes.

Integrates, for example

  • AI-drafted replies inside your existing inbox or helpdesk, written in your voice and reviewed before sending
  • A plain-language layer over your CRM or database, so anyone can ask "what closed last month" instead of building a report
  • Contract and document review that flags risk and pulls key terms straight into the systems you already track them in

Workflow and process automation

The manual handoffs, gone.

We find the repetitive approvals and manual handoffs inside your operations and rebuild them as automations that run without a person in the loop.

Automates, for example

  • Invoice intake, coding, and approval routing, from inbox to your accounting system, with no manual entry
  • Weekly operations and executive reporting, generated automatically from live data instead of assembled by hand
  • Lead handoff between marketing and sales: enrichment, routing, and follow-up reminders, with zero manual touch

From first call to a live automation, in four steps.

  1. 30 minutes

    Diagnostic call

    We map where your team's time is actually going and flag the two or three places most worth automating first. There is no obligation, and you keep the shortlist either way.

  2. Before you commit

    Automation blueprint

    A scoped, fixed-price plan covering what gets built and which systems it touches, with the time it should save you, before you commit to anything further.

  3. 3–4 weeks to first live

    Build and integrate

    We build inside your existing stack and test it against real cases with your team.

  4. 30 days included

    Live, monitored, handed off

    Your automation goes live with 30 days of monitoring and tuning included, plus documentation and a walkthrough so your team can maintain and extend it.

From our own operations

We automated this for ourselves, first.

Before we built anything for clients, we automated our own receipt-to-tax-spreadsheet process. Photograph a receipt and the system reads it, passes it through an LLM parsing step, and adds it to a categorised spreadsheet linked back to the original photo. It checks for duplicates, flags anything that needs a human look and files the photo in the right folder. It captures roughly twice the detail of a standard expense entry, in the time it takes to take a photo.

Illustrative mock-up. Example data.7 of 28 columns shown
DateMerchantCategoryGrossVATNetReview
14 Sep 2026Corner CaféMeals£8.40£1.40£7.00Clear
15 Sep 2026Metro FuelTravel£52.10£8.68£43.42Clear
16 Sep 2026UnclearUnsorted£23.00––Needs a look

Our own operations: receipt to spreadsheet

6–8 min

What logging a single receipt by hand used to cost us, on average. Our own figure, not a client's.

~8 sec

Time per receipt now: uploading the photo to the shared folder, plus a second or two for the system to read it and add the row.

28 fields

Recorded for every receipt. Nine are read from the receipt itself: date, merchant, category, currency, gross, VAT and net totals, receipt number and payment method. The rest are the audit trail: duplicate check, review notes, who resolved it and when, and a note for the accountant.

3–7%

Of receipts are flagged for a person to look at, on average. We would rather the system ask than guess. The rest go straight through.

Time per receipt multiplies

A worked example. The volumes are illustrative, not ours; what carries over to your business is the time each item takes.

1.5–2.7 hrs

a month, at 15–20 receipts and 6–8 minutes each, done by hand.

20–27 hrs

a month, at 200 receipts and the same 6–8 minutes each.

Independent research, for context
  • 20 min

    Average time to process one expense report, industry-wide, for less detail than we now capture. GBTA Foundation / HRS study

  • 68%

    Of finance leaders say manual work leaves their organisation vulnerable to errors that undermine business decisions. BlackLine, 2024 survey of 1,300+ finance leaders

  • $9.84

    Average cost to process a single document by hand, industry-wide, against $2.65 for top-performing teams. Ardent Partners, State of ePayables 2025

  • 5.2 hrs/wk

    Average time AI already saves UK SME decision-makers, more than half a working day. OpenAI data, via TechRadar, March 2026

  • 79%

    Faster processing for leading, automated finance and ops teams, against manual peers. Ardent Partners, State of ePayables 2025

  • 59 min/day

    Lost by UK knowledge workers switching between apps and hunting for information. Qatalog & Cornell University, Workgeist Report '21, cited in VentureBeat

These are separate data points from different studies. They are independent research, and client case studies will appear here as engagements complete.

Where the two disciplines come from.

Our experience is hands-on and technical, in the exact two areas Aurum works in.

Behind our custom AI integrations

3+years

Training and evaluating models for frontier AI labs

Chain-of-thought reasoning

Authoring and grading step-by-step reasoning traces, with every intermediate step verified as well as the final answer: the raw material for process supervision.

Web-agent training

Multi-step browser tasks on live sites: navigating the DOM, completing forms, recovering from failed actions. Trajectories are scored on the final state of the task.

Live LLM tool calling

Models invoking real tools through function-calling schemas: selecting the tool, constructing valid arguments, parsing the response and recovering from errors and malformed output across multi-turn sequences.

Rubric-based subject-matter-expert content

Expert-written prompts and reference answers, graded against explicit weighted rubrics so quality is measurable and agreement between reviewers can be checked.

Behind our workflow and process automation

4+years

Chip design and software engineering at Arm and Intel

Processor design

Pipelines, caches and instruction scheduling, specified in RTL and verified against timing, power and area before tape-out. Silicon cannot be patched once it ships.

Automation tooling

Regression and build flows that run unattended on Linux compute clusters: scripted, deterministic and reproducible down to the log line.

Python, C++ and Linux

Python to orchestrate, C++ where the cycles matter, Linux underneath: processes, filesystems, schedulers and the shell.

Open-source machine-learning libraries

Contributions to the open-source machine-learning libraries behind real-time AI optimisation: inference latency, throughput and memory footprint, reviewed in public by the maintainers.

Both share one standard: it has to be right before it ships.

A note from the founders

Our backgrounds started with degrees in Cognitive Neuroscience and Mechatronics Engineering, both from the University of Manchester. As two friends, we saw the opportunity to build Aurum with a clear mission. That mission comes from our own experience. Automation technology, native to our own lines of work, creates massive opportunities from the time it saves. Yet it isn't being used by the people who could benefit from it most, simply because they either didn't know it existed, or didn't know how to implement it.

As the world around us gets more expensive and less stable, we know as well as anyone how hard it can feel to prioritise your time. It can feel like you have to choose between building financial success and having time for what actually matters to you. So, we aim to give back measurable time to those who feel like they could benefit from the extra hours. From this, you are given the choice to make yourself:

Do you keep working on pushing your success forward, or do you take the opportunity to live life and have systems take care of the things that used to hold you back?

The hours are there to be won back. If you'd like to see where yours are going, we'd love to talk it through on a call.

The founders of Aurum
Before You Spend Anything

Your free Valuation, itemised.

The Aurum Workflow Valuation puts a figure on the hours in your workflows: thirty minutes with a founder, then a written report. The report is yours to keep, whether or not we ever work together.

Aurum AutomationWorkflow Valuation
  • A 30-minute working session with a founder, not a pitch
  • Your 2–3 highest-return automations, ranked, with the hours and cost of that time shown
  • A fixed-price blueprint for each, yours to keep
  • What we would leave alone, and an honest no if that's the answer
  • One written report, within five working days
  • A signed confidentiality and data-processing agreement, before any access is granted
A day of comparable consulting£550–£620
Your Valuation£0

At least seven hours of founder research go into every report. Consulting day rates: ITJobsWatch; YunoJuno, 2026. Our working days run Monday to Saturday.

On the call we ask which systems you use, how the work runs today, and what success would look like to you. No obligation.

Book your free Valuation

What it costs.

Every number is fixed before any work begins, so there is no surprise invoice halfway through.

Initial build

£5,450–£8,950

Where projects start. The build and integration inside your existing tools, testing on your real cases with your team, documentation and a walkthrough, and 30 days of monitoring and tuning after it goes live.

Full engagement

£10,800–£17,400

Where most full engagements land, depending on scope.

Ongoing optimisation

£840–£1,470 a month

Optional. Continuous monitoring, upgrades as our own systems improve, security and efficiency updates as the market changes, priority support, and direct access to the team.

How you pay

30%On signing. Refundable until the build starts.
40%When the first automation is live.
30%Once your hours are back, confirmed at the 60-day count.

On a £5,450 build that is £1,635, £2,180 and £1,635. Prices exclude VAT.

What the retainer includes

Most automations don't fail all at once. They drift: an API changes its format, a tool deprecates a feature, an AI model update changes how something behaves, and the first sign is usually a report that's quietly wrong. The retainer exists to catch that before you do.

Each month, we monitor every automation we've built for you and watch for exactly that kind of drift, not just outright failures. When the tools underneath an automation change, whether that's an API update, a platform change or a new model version, we update the build to keep pace, rather than leaving you to notice it's stopped working properly.

As our own code and systems improve, those improvements reach what we built for you too, so it keeps getting more efficient rather than ageing in place.

The integrations and credentials involved are kept current and checked for security issues, since these systems often touch things like your CRM, invoicing or client data. And you have priority support and a direct line to the team itself, not a ticket queue, whenever something needs attention.

Until the hours come back, the job isn't finished.

Before the build starts, we agree one number with you: the hours this work takes each week today, and the figure we are aiming for. Both go into your statement of work, so we are working to the same line. Sixty days after go-live, we count again.

Aurum Automation60-day guarantee
  1. Before the buildWe record the hours the work takes each week today and agree the figure we are aiming for. Both go in your statement of work.
  2. At go-liveThe automation goes live and the 60 days begin. Monitoring covers the first 30.
  3. Sixty days laterWe count again, the same way, against that number.
  4. If it falls shortWe keep working on it, at our cost, until it reaches the target.
Extra fees if we fall short£0

The target is the one written into your statement of work. If something on your side delays the build, such as access, feedback or a change of scope, the 60 days move by the same amount.

We run two builds at a time. The founders build each one themselves, which is how we can promise to keep working until the number is hit.

Book your free Valuation

Before you book a call.

Questions operators actually ask.

What does this cost?

Every number is fixed before any work begins, so there is no surprise invoice. The ranges for a build, a full engagement and the optional monthly retainer are in What it costs, above, and we'll walk through the options on the call.

How long until something is actually live?

Most clients have a first automation live within 3–4 weeks of kickoff. We start narrow, with one workflow done properly, rather than a six-month platform rollout.

We already tried an automation tool and it didn't stick.

That is the most common story we hear, and it is rarely the team's fault. Off-the-shelf automation tools ask you to fit your process into their template. We start with your actual process, exceptions and edge cases included, and build to that, inside the tools you already use.

Is our data safe?

Yes. We work inside your existing infrastructure and vendor agreements wherever possible, sign standard confidentiality and data-processing agreements before any access is granted, and never use client data to train third-party models. We're the sort who read the privacy policy before installing an app, and we bring the same care to your data as to our own.

Do we have to replace our current tools?

No. We integrate with your CRM, inbox and internal systems. If a tool is already working for you, it stays exactly where it is.

What happens after you leave, and can our team maintain it?

Every automation ships with documentation and a walkthrough with your team, plus 30 days of monitoring and tuning included as standard. Most clients keep us on afterwards for ongoing support. Nothing we build is a black box, so you are never dependent on us.

Is it actually worth the cost?

Try the calculator above with your own numbers first. For scale: at the £12,034 a year per employee quoted above, automating even two people's worth is over £24,000 a year, against a build from £5,450. It pays for itself within months, then keeps paying. The part we can't put a number on is the time itself: your team gets it back for the work that matters, and what they do with it is yours to decide.

Do we need someone technical on our team?

Not at all. An IT team or a technical hire helps, but you don't need one. What we need from you is the detail of how the work really gets done, including the exceptions and workarounds, because that is what tells us what to build. Expect more than a single call: a diagnostic up front, working sessions as we test against real cases with your team, and a walkthrough once it's live. The technical build, the integration and the documentation are ours to carry, start to finish.

Is Aurum a fit for us?

Usually, but not always. We build automations around a process that already exists and runs the same way most of the time, so if you don't yet have a defined recurring workflow, there's nothing stable for us to automate yet, and that's worth fixing first. We're also not the right fit for a full platform migration. For replacing your tools wholesale, a platform implementation partner is the better call.

Ready when you are

Your team's time is the most valuable thing you have.

Book your free Valuation: thirty minutes with a founder, then a written report that tells you honestly whether automation is worth it, before you spend anything.

Book your free Valuation A 30-minute call, then a written report within five working days. No obligation.