Maku

Automation that gives your team back their week.

We automate real back-office workflows: intake, extraction, drafting, routing, reporting, connected to the tools you already run. One workflow at a time, with monitoring built in.

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How we work

The problem

The workflow that eats an afternoon a week.

Every business has at least one workflow that still runs by hand. Someone checks an inbox, pulls numbers into a spreadsheet, copies them into another system, chases down what’s missing. It’s not hard work. It’s just slow, and it doesn’t stop when the person doing it takes a day off.

Hiring more people doesn’t fix the workflow, it just adds more hands doing the same manual steps. Buying a generic automation tool often means weeks of dragging boxes around a canvas before it does what you actually need.

We build automation around one real workflow at a time: intake, classification, extraction, drafting, routing and reporting, connected to the tools you already run, email, spreadsheets, your CRM, your accounting software, your WordPress site. If what you need is closer to a new piece of software than a fix to an existing process, our AI product development page is the better fit. If you want AI features running inside the WordPress site itself, see AI for WordPress.

What you get

What a workflow build covers.

Workflow mapping

We map the exact steps your team does by hand now, so automation matches how the business actually works, not a guess at it.

Document and email intake

Extraction and classification from invoices, forms, applications and emails, so information lands in the right system without someone retyping it.

Drafting and routing

Draft replies, summaries and internal notes ready for a quick check, then routed to the right person or queue automatically.

Reconciliation and reporting

Numbers get matched across systems and reported in plain language, so you catch mismatches before they become a problem.

Connected to what you already use

Built to work with your email, spreadsheets, CRM, accounting software and WordPress site, not a separate tool your team has to learn.

Monitoring, exceptions and an audit trail

Every run is logged. Anything the system isn’t confident about goes to a person, not straight into your records.

Process

How a workflow gets automated.

Map the workflow

We sit down with the people who do the work now and map every step, decision and exception, so we’re automating the real thing.

Build and connect

We build the workflow and connect it to your existing tools, testing against real documents and real edge cases as we go.

Run alongside your team

The workflow runs in parallel with a person checking the output, so we can tune it before it touches your live systems.

Launch and monitor

We switch it on, watch it closely in the first weeks, and hand over a plain-English explanation of what it does.

Measure, then automate the next one

We measure hours saved on the first workflow before we talk about a second. That’s how we decide where automation earns its place.

Skip AI

Not every job needs AI.

Some repetitive tasks are genuinely rule-based: moving a file when a form is submitted, sending a reminder on a fixed schedule, updating a status when a payment clears. A simple script, or a plain tool like Zapier or Make, does that faster, cheaper and more predictably than an AI model ever will. We say so when it’s true, even if it means recommending a smaller, cheaper project than the one you asked about.

AI earns its place when the work involves reading, judgement or language: understanding an email that doesn’t follow a template, deciding which category something loosely belongs in, drafting a first version of a reply that still needs a human tone. That’s where the time actually gets lost in most businesses, and it’s where plain, rule-based automation on its own usually falls short.

Why Maku

Why businesses pick us for this.

The person who maps your workflow is the person who builds and monitors it. Nobody hands your project to a different team partway through, and nobody has to re-learn how your business works halfway in.

  • We start with one workflow, not a platform rebuild, so you see hours saved before you commit to more.
  • Exceptions go to a person by default. The system doesn’t guess when it isn’t confident.
  • We automate our own work the same way, which is how we know where a workflow tends to break before you find out the hard way.
  • See our AI agents page if what you need acts more independently across a task than a single defined workflow.

FAQ

Questions we get asked

What’s the difference between automation and AI development?

Automation takes a workflow you already do by hand and does it faster, with monitoring and a person handling exceptions. AI product development builds new software around AI, often for something that doesn’t exist yet. Most clients start with automation, because the payoff is faster and easier to measure.

What’s the difference between automation and agents?

An automated workflow follows a defined path: intake, extraction, drafting, routing. An AI agent makes more decisions along the way and can handle tasks that don’t follow one fixed sequence. We build the workflow first in most cases, then add agent-style decisions where the work genuinely needs them.

Which tasks actually suit automation?

Anything repetitive, high-volume and reasonably well-defined: processing invoices, triaging support emails, pulling data from forms, reconciling numbers between two systems, generating routine reports. If a task changes completely every time, it’s usually a worse fit.

How do we know it’s actually working?

You get a plain-language log of what ran, what it did and what got flagged for a person to check. We agree what “working” means before we build, usually hours saved or faster turnaround, and measure against that from day one.

What happens if it makes a mistake?

It’s built to send anything it isn’t confident about to a person, instead of guessing. Every run is logged, so mistakes are visible and traceable, not hidden inside a black box. We tune the workflow based on what those exceptions show us.

Does this replace staff?

It removes the repetitive part of a job, not the job itself. Most teams we work with put that time towards the parts of the role a spreadsheet was never going to handle: judgement calls, relationships, the work that actually needs a person.

What does it cost to run each month?

Running costs depend on volume and which tools the workflow connects to, mostly the usage cost of the AI model plus software you’re likely already paying for. We give you a realistic monthly estimate before we build anything, alongside the fixed project price.

How long until the first workflow is live?

Most first workflows take a few weeks from mapping to launch, depending on how many systems the process touches. We’d rather scope it properly than promise a date before we’ve seen the work, so describe the workflow and we’ll come back with a timeline and a fixed price.

AI

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Building something ambitious?

Send us a few honest paragraphs about what you’re building, who it’s for and when you need it live. We’ll reply with a straight answer.

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support@maku.au