Guides

These guides from AR Labs are for owners and managers of small service businesses who want to fix or automate part of how their business runs. Each sets out steps you can follow yourself, with a checklist, and recommends the simplest change first: a better form, a call script, or a setting in software you already pay for, before connecting tools, building custom software or adding AI. They say where off-the-shelf software is already enough, and they mark the decisions that should stay with a person.

Two guides set out the general method: how to map a business process before automating it, and how to decide what to automate with AI in a small business. The others apply that method to one workflow each: music school scheduling and tutor matching, with a companion reference on enquiry form fields; turning service calls into dispatch-ready jobs for trades firms; client intake for agencies and consultancies; onboarding new clients for bookkeeping practices; collecting facts before a first legal consultation; and following up enquiries and quotes.

We have designed one such system in detail, for an in-home music school, and the music-school and tutoring guides draw on that design work, with the school's details removed, and on public material from music and tutoring operators. The case study describes the design. The other guides rest on the same method, on what owners and staff say in public forums and job advertisements, and on the software vendors' own documentation; each says near the top what it rests on. We have not built systems for trades firms, agencies, bookkeepers or law firms.