FAQ
Honest answers about how Business Butler works, what it costs and how to start. Add your own question by booking a Discovery call.
The Discovery call is free. Business Butler is £995/month + from £600 setup, one flat fee for both modules. Butler Bespoke is POA, confirmed after Discovery, for higher-volume, multi-entity or industry-specific workflows that go beyond the standard offering.
The monthly fee is fixed and locked when we agree the engagement. The setup baseline is confirmed in your Findings Report after Discovery and only flexes upward if a regulated sector, unusual stack or deeper diagnostic warrants it. Monthly rolling. Cancel anytime.
Monthly rolling. Cancel any time. Setup fees are non-refundable and pay for the technical enablement and configuration work needed to get your Business Butler running properly. Most clients stay because the value is clear.
The monthly fee is fixed and locked when we agree the engagement. The setup baseline may flex upward only when Discovery identifies complexity that warrants it: a regulated sector, an unusual software stack or a deeper diagnostic, and only with your written agreement before work starts. Any scope changes after that are discussed and agreed before any work happens.
Monthly rolling. Cancel any time after Setup completes, with one month's notice. When you cancel we stop billing at the next monthly cycle, disconnect Business Butler from your software within five working days and give you 30 days to export your operational data (intake records, audit log, drafts history) before we delete your tenant data permanently.
What you keep regardless: your Findings Report from Discovery, your Setup notes documenting the workflows we mapped and the ability to revoke our integration permissions in your own software accounts at any time.
UK service businesses with 5 to 50 people running project-based work. Events and exhibitions initially, with a broader view across other service verticals over time. Owner-led teams whose business has outgrown what one person can hold in their head. Cheshire and the North West of England is our initial focus, but we work across the UK.
We are not a fit for solopreneurs or sole traders, businesses with an existing operations function or anyone wanting a one-off chatbot or phone-answering service.
It is the principle that Business Butler handles the routine and the judgement calls stay with you. Butler runs both ends of the job. At the pitch side, it drafts estimates from your rate card. At the pay side, it catches supplier costs and drafts recharges before you bill. What it does not do is make decisions on your behalf that carry consequence: sending an estimate to a client without your sign-off, approving a supplier cost that looks unusual, pushing a client invoice out before you have signed off the recharge lines.
The default is: Butler drafts, you sign off. Drafts land in the native tool (your accounting package for the recharges, your rate-card system for the estimates) and a short daily briefing flags what is waiting for your review. Where the line sits is configurable. Some clients want low-value in-pattern recharges to flow through automatically and only unusual items escalated for review. Others want every draft in front of them before anything moves. We map this in Discovery and configure it in Setup.
Yes. Data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest. Multi-tenant isolation at the database level. Every operational row carries a tenant_id and every query is scoped to your tenant. There is no path for one client's data to be visible to another. OAuth is used for all software connections, scoped to the minimum permissions needed for each workflow. We do not store the credentials for the tools we connect to, only the OAuth tokens, which you can revoke at any time in those tools. An audit log records every action Business Butler takes against your data, retained for 12 months and available to you.
We are not certified ISO 27001 today (we are a small team), but the underlying cloud infrastructure is operated to enterprise standards. We can share the specific compliance posture of each vendor in Discovery. If your business operates in a regulated environment (FCA, CQC, ISO) and the standard posture is not enough, we will flag this in Discovery and discuss what Bespoke would need to look like.
In the UK and EU. Operational data is stored and processed in a secure Irish data centre inside the EU, under UK/EU GDPR. AI-model requests are routed through the EU endpoint. We do not transfer your operational data outside the UK and EU under standard configuration. If your business has specific data residency requirements that go further (for example, a contractual restriction to UK-only with no EU fallback), we will scope this in Discovery and confirm we can meet it before you commit.
The principle is straightforward. Only people who need access for delivery see anything, and you can audit who has touched what. Your team: only the people you authorise in the Business Butler app. Time Back employees: only those authorised for delivery and support. Access is logged in the audit trail you can see at any time. Vendor staff at our cloud infrastructure providers: standard vendor-side access for incident response and platform operation, governed by their published policies. No vendor-side access for routine work. Third parties: never, unless you have explicitly asked us to share something (for example, sending a Findings Report to your accountant).
The audit log shows every action Business Butler takes against your data plus every Time Back employee access. We do not log into your software accounts. The integrations work via OAuth-scoped permissions, not via people logging in as you. If you need a named data processing agreement (DPA) for a specific compliance posture, we can sign one. Request it in Discovery.
