Common questions,
straight answers.

Yes — every engagement starts with a free Discovery Call. It's a no-obligation chat where we talk through your business, the manual work that's bugging you, and whether automation is even the right fit. If it's not, I'll tell you straight and you've lost nothing. If it is, the next step is the paid Automation Audit. The call costs you nothing and there's no commitment either way.

I connect the business systems you already use — Cin7, Shopify, Pipedrive, Xero, Klaviyo and the like — so they talk to each other automatically. The result is no more manually re-typing the same order, customer or invoice from one tool into another, and no more repetitive copy-paste jobs eating your team's day. You keep your tools; I get rid of the busywork between them.

The audit comes after our free Discovery Call, once we've both agreed automation's worth pursuing. It's the bit that keeps everyone honest. I sit down with how your work actually flows, identify the repetitive tasks worth automating, and measure a real baseline — how many hours those tasks cost you each month right now. That baseline is what the build gets measured against, and it's what the guarantee is pegged to. It's NZ$750–1,500, and it's credited straight back toward your build if you go ahead, so it's not money down the drain.

It starts with a free Discovery Call to check there's a fit — no cost, no obligation. From there it's three paid stages, always in the same order. Audit sets the baseline and scope. Signature Build (NZ$4,000–12,000) is where I build and connect the automations. Care Retainer (NZ$400–2,000/month) keeps everything running — monitoring, fixing things when one of your tools changes its API, and tweaking as your process evolves. You can stop after the build, but most things break quietly over time when no one's watching them, which is what the retainer is for.

The Discovery Call is free. After that: Audit NZ$750–1,500 (credited toward the build). Signature Build NZ$4,000–12,000 depending on how many workflows and how complex. Care Retainer NZ$400–2,000/month based on what's running and how much it needs watching. Nothing's locked in until after the free call, and the audit gives you firm numbers for your specific situation before you commit to anything bigger.

The automated tasks drop to under 20% of the audited baseline hours within three months — or I refund the audit fee. The threshold is set off your actual measured baseline and the percentage we scoped together in the audit, so it's never a number I've plucked from the air. It matches exactly what was promised.

A typical build runs a few weeks from audit to live, depending on scope and how clean the connections are. The guarantee gives the full picture three months out, but in practice you'll usually feel the difference within the first few weeks of a workflow going live — that's the whole point of measuring the baseline first, so the change is visible rather than a vibe.

The sweet spot is anything repetitive, high-frequency and rule-based: re-entering orders between systems, syncing stock or contacts, sending the same templated emails, pulling the same report every week, chasing the same data across tools. If a task happens often and a human follows the same steps each time with little judgement involved, it's usually a strong candidate. The audit is where we work out which of yours pay off fastest.

Not at all. You need to know your business and how the work flows — I handle every bit of the technical side and the connections. You get plain-English explanations of what's been built and documentation you can actually read, not a black box.

You're never locked in. Everything's built on standard n8n and fully documented, so if you end the retainer you get the exported workflows and a clean handover, and they keep running on your accounts. The retainer isn't a kill switch — it covers monitoring, fixing things when one of your tools changes its API, and tweaking as your process evolves. It's insurance and iteration, not a hostage situation.

Your automations run on your own accounts using your own credentials — TimeBack connects your systems, it doesn't take custody of your data. Where AI is involved, bulk tasks use a privacy-scoped open model and anything client-facing or sensitive runs on a zero-retention frontier model, so your data isn't used for training and isn't retained. If you've got hard data-residency requirements, we can keep inference local to your environment. Happy to walk through specifics for your setup during the audit.

A VA does the repetitive work; automation deletes it. A general developer can build you something, but you're then carrying the maintenance and the "it broke and no one knows why" risk. TimeBack is scoped to a measurable outcome — the audit sets a baseline, the build hits it, and the guarantee holds me to it. You're buying hours back permanently, not renting someone to keep doing the task.

That's not the point of it — the name's a clue. The goal is to take the dull, repetitive, error-prone work off your team so the same people can do the work that actually needs a human. Most clients aren't looking to shrink headcount; they're trying to stop good staff burning hours on copy-paste between systems and free them up for the stuff that grows the business.

The named tools (Cin7, Shopify, Pipedrive, Xero, Klaviyo) are just the ones I work with most. If your system has an API or can send a webhook — which most modern business software can — it can almost certainly be connected. If it can't, I'll tell you that straight in the audit before you've committed to a build.