You are in the ute at the end of the day with the engine running and the phone in your hand. Two invoices from last month are still unpaid and you have not chased either of them, because chasing feels awkward. A quote you measured up on Saturday is still in your head. Three enquiries came in while you were on the tools, and one of those people has probably rung somebody else by now. None of it is hard. All of it is admin, and it all waits for you.
AI automation for a small business does that admin without you: a system that reads your sales, bookings and accounts, does the office work you currently do after dark, and puts every email, quote and reminder in front of you for approval before it reaches a customer.
Who is this for?
This is business automation for Sunshine Coast owner-operators, and for the same businesses anywhere in Australia: tradies, clinics, salons, cafes and solo professionals with real work coming in and admin piling up behind it. If you know what you are owed and have not chased it, or you have quotes in your head and enquiries in your inbox, this is the page. The people building it are on the Coastworks AI about page.
The automation does not go looking for new customers. It keeps the ones you already have from drifting off while the admin sits undone. If more work through the door is what you need, say so at the consult and we will be upfront about it.
What do the automations actually do?
They take the admin jobs with clear rules, one part of your business at a time, and put the results in one short report every morning.
| The element | What runs | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts | Overdue invoices chased politely in your own words until they are paid, payments matched against invoices, failed payments recovered, expense emails filed | A cash line in your morning report: who paid overnight, who is overdue, what is drafted waiting for you |
| Operations | Bookings and jobs pulled into the report with gaps and cancellations flagged, review requests after every finished job, paperwork filed the moment it arrives | The admin that eats your evenings, done by breakfast |
| Sales | Every enquiry captured and confirmed in minutes with a reply drafted for your approval, quotes out the same day and followed up before they go cold, a payment link when you say go | Who is ready to buy and who has gone quiet |
| Service | Customer replies drafted and waiting for your approval, website chat that answers from your own published content and hands anything uncertain to a person, feedback that reaches you the moment it arrives | Nothing sitting unanswered, and nothing sent that you did not read first |
Underneath all four sits the Engine: a small piece of hardware in the cloud that you own, connected to the tools you already use through read-only links you create and control, and the morning report that pulls it all into one page. If you want to know which of these to switch on first, we wrote up what a small business should automate first.
What is the one rule?
Nothing reaches a customer without you approving it. Every reminder, every reply and every quote is drafted, then waits for a tap on your phone. You approve it, edit it, or reject it. The system does the drafting and the chasing. Judgement stays yours, and so do the prices on every quote.
Which tools does it connect to?
Whatever you already run, as long as it can be read. Accounting like Xero or MYOB, payments like Square or Stripe, booking and job systems like ServiceM8, Tradify, Cliniko or Calendly. Every connection is read-only: the system can see your jobs, invoices and payments to build the report and draft the follow-ups, and it cannot change anything inside them. Your tools stay exactly where they are.
Can I do this myself?
Some of the pieces, yes. Switch on the invoice reminders inside Xero or MYOB, check that ServiceM8, Cliniko or whatever runs your bookings is sending its own confirmations, and when a follow-up email needs writing, paste the details into ChatGPT or Claude and let it draft one. All of that is worth doing this week.
What none of those can do is read across your business and act on it: notice the invoice about to hit 60 days and draft a gentler third chaser to your best account, spot the quote that went quiet, and tell you all of it in one place before you open the doors. That judgement layer is the system we build, and it runs in accounts you own.
What does it cost?
The Engine is $3,500 one-off and includes one element of your choice. Each further element is $950, added any time. The Website + Email Build at $5,950 and the Full Business Launch at $8,900 include the Engine and all five elements. A monthly care plan, from $195, adds new automations to your elements every month. Running costs are yours and never marked up: your own server at $15 to $25 a month and your own AI subscription from $30 a month.
Every price is flat and published on our homepage. Nothing is rented, and if we disappeared tomorrow, everything we built keeps running in accounts you own.
What have we done with it?
This website is the proof. Every enquiry that reaches us is logged, answered and in the morning report before most owners have opened their laptop, and the same system files the mail and drafts what goes out. New pages are submitted to Google and Bing the day they go live. We built and tested every automation on our own businesses before it went into an element. The whole thing is written up in the business you are looking at, and the report itself in the daily business report. The biggest example runs in the open at sunshinecoastbusinessguide.com.au: 12,000 Sunshine Coast businesses, every listed website checked daily, closed ones taken down the same day, owner claims and edits handled end to end, all by the same kind of system we build for clients.
How does it start?
Answer a few short questions about your business and the tools you run on. The 60 minute consult is $295, credited toward a build, and you will leave it knowing which order to switch things on.
Flat prices. No hourly rates. Your accounts, your passwords, your systems.
Related reading The real numbers on late invoices in Australia · What should a small business automate first? · AI for tradies: how to get every quote out the same day · The daily business report: know your numbers before breakfast · ServiceM8 automations worth turning on