Questions we get asked

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, not because they have to.

Monthly fees are fixed per tier 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 the 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. We do not lock you in with annual contracts as standard. The annual prepay (10% discount) exists for clients who want it, but the default is monthly rolling because we want clients to stay because the value is clear, not because they have to.

UK service businesses with 5 to 25 people. Professional services, trades, consultancies, training providers, removals. 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’re 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.

Two productised tiers plus Bespoke. The tiers are defined by capability layer.

• Butler Co-ordinator (£750/month) is the automation layer. The Business Butler connects the tools you already use and runs the routine work between them: quotes and invoices drafted in Xero, CRM updates, calendar bookings, lead capture, scheduled reports. Pure automation. Most clients start here.
• Butler Administrator (£1,495/month) is the automation plus AI reasoning layer. Everything Co-ordinator does, plus the AI reasoning layer reads incoming emails and drafts replies in your team’s voice, prioritises what needs your eyes today, flags blockers, drafts follow-up sequences for quiet deals. The judgement call stays with you.
• Butler Bespoke (POA) is for 25+ person operations or industry-specific workflows that go beyond what the standard tiers cover. Process review, custom integrations, dedicated build, scoped delivery timeline. Confirmed after Discovery.

You start in the tier that fits where the business is now and move up as the operational needs grow.

Three different things that often get bundled into one buzzword. Here’s how to think about them:

• Automation is rule-based. It does exactly what you tell it to. If an enquiry comes through your web form, add it to HubSpot. If a job is marked complete, draft an invoice in Xero. Fast, deterministic, no judgement. Brilliant for the routine work that follows the same pattern every time. It can’t read tone or context, and it doesn’t draft language. Butler Co-ordinator runs on automation only.
• AI is reasoning. It can read an email and understand what it’s asking, draft a reply in your team’s voice, prioritise what needs your attention this morning, summarise a long client thread. Where automation says “if X then Y,” AI says “given everything I know, here’s what I’d do.” It’s the language and judgement-assistive work that automation can’t touch.
• AI & Automation is the combination. Automation moves the work between systems. AI reads, drafts and prioritises the things that need human-feeling output. Together they replace what an ops manager or part-time admin hire does. Butler Administrator is automation + AI.

The price difference between Co-ordinator (£750/month) and Administrator (£1,495/month) is the AI reasoning layer. You’re paying for the language work, the prioritisation, the judgement-assistive drafts that get you to the decision point so you can sign off in seconds.

Automation alone gets you to “the work is done.” AI on top gets you to “the work is done and the response is drafted in your voice ready to send.”

No. Business Butler is a system that connects the software your team already uses and runs continuously in the background. It is not something the team has to chat with. There is no app to learn or interface to navigate. The team uses the tools they already use.

Where the Business Butler shows up day-to-day is in the daily briefing email (what came in, what was actioned, what needs your attention) and, at Administrator tier, in drafts that land in your existing inbox or accounting tool ready for sign-off.

Voice is one input among several, not the product. We don’t lead with phone-answering or chat as features because they aren’t what the Business Butler is for.

It’s the principle that the Business Butler handles the routine and the judgement calls stay with you.

The Business Butler runs continuously: capturing inbound work, moving information between your tools, drafting outbound paperwork at Administrator tier. What it does not do is make decisions on your behalf that carry consequence: sending the message that goes out under your name, agreeing the variation, approving an invoice for an unusual amount, escalating a difficult client conversation.

Where the line sits is configurable. Some clients want the Business Butler to send routine acknowledgements automatically and only escalate when something is unusual. Others want everything drafted and reviewed before it goes anywhere. We map this in Discovery and configure it in Setup.

At Administrator tier specifically, the principle becomes: the Business Butler drafts, you sign off. Drafts land in the native tool (Gmail Drafts, Xero) and the daily briefing flags what’s waiting for your review.

It depends on your tier:

• Co-ordinator: the automation layer. The Business Butler connects the tools you already use and runs the routine work between them: quotes and invoices drafted in Xero, CRM updated, calendar bookings, lead capture from web forms and email, scheduled reports. Everything ready for your sign-off. Pure automation.
• Administrator: everything in Co-ordinator, plus the AI reasoning layer. The Business Butler reads incoming emails and drafts replies in your team’s voice, prioritises what needs your eyes today, flags blockers, drafts follow-up sequences for quiet deals. The judgement call stays with you. The Business Butler drafts. You sign off.
• Bespoke: scoped after Discovery for 25+ person teams or industry-specific workflows beyond the standard tiers.

The Business Butler handles the routine. The judgement calls stay with you.

The tools most UK service teams already use. Common integrations on day one:

• Email: Gmail, Outlook
• Calendar: Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar
• CRM: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Capsule, Insightly
• Accounting and invoicing: Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent
• Project and job management: Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, Jobber, ServiceM8
• Communications: Slack, Microsoft Teams
• Document storage: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox
• Forms: Google Forms, Typeform, your website

If your stack is on this list, you’re well covered. If it includes something else, we’ll look at it in Discovery and tell you straight whether we can connect to it today, whether it would be a Bespoke add, or whether we can’t.

Time Back is sector-agnostic in the UK service business space, with one filter: 5 to 25 person teams that have crossed the threshold where a single person can no longer hold the operations in their head.

Common fits include professional services (legal, accounting, consulting, financial advice), skilled trades (electrical, plumbing, construction, fit-out, removals), creative agencies and studios, training providers and allied health practitioners, owner-led recruitment agencies and independent estate agencies.

We have vertical pages for the four sectors we’ve done most work in (construction, general discovery, estate agency, recruitment), but the platform is the same underlying multi-tenant system configured to your business.

Where we’re not a fit: regulated environments where a bespoke compliance posture is required, enterprises with an internal ops function and businesses with a Chief of Staff or Operations Manager already in post.

The reasoning layer that powers the Business Butler is built on Anthropic’s Claude family of models. Specifically Claude Sonnet for real-time work like voice interactions and live drafts and Claude Opus for offline reasoning like the daily briefing summarisation and the Discovery Findings Report draft.

The rest of the stack is built for production reliability rather than novelty:

• Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects for the operational runtime
• Supabase for the multi-tenant data layer
• Twilio for voice, SMS and per-client phone numbers
• Resend for transactional email
• ElevenLabs for premium voice (optional)

We pick the model that fits the job, swap when a better one ships and flag in the daily briefing if anything material has changed underneath. You don’t need to think about which model is doing what.

The Discovery call takes 45 minutes. Your Findings Report arrives within 48 hours. If you proceed, Setup is a two-week configuration phase. Mapping your customer journey, documenting your SOPs, provisioning your Butler app, securely wiring your software access and hand-holding the system until it’s running cleanly. Your Business Butler goes live and monthly billing starts at the end of Setup.

Setup is a scoped two-week configuration phase, not an open-ended consulting engagement.

Week 1: Configuration and onboarding. One-hour kickoff call to walk through the Findings Report and lock the workflows in scope. We provision your tenant in the Business Butler app, wire your software access via OAuth at the right scope for each tool (read-only where we can, read-write only where the workflow needs it) and generate the operational context for your business: voice and tone, escalation rules, who the regular contacts are, what the tools are used for.

Week 2: Going live. We connect the inbound channels (email, web form, dedicated Butler line), run the workflows on real traffic with close monitoring, refine based on what we see (almost always something needs a tweak) and do daily check-ins at the end of week 2 to confirm everything is running cleanly.

End of week 2 the Business Butler goes live and monthly billing starts. Total time commitment from you across the two weeks is typically three to four hours: the kickoff hour, access provisioning, two 15-minute check-ins in week 2 and your eyes on the first few daily briefings.

No and we built it that way deliberately.

The Business Butler runs in the background, connecting the software your team already uses. The team continues working in the same tools they already work in (their existing email, their existing CRM, their existing accounts package). The Business Butler captures inbound work, moves information between those tools and at Administrator tier drafts outbound work for owner sign-off.

The team doesn’t have a new app to learn or a new login to remember. The day-to-day for them is the same, just with the back-office admin removed.

The only person who actively interacts with the Business Butler app is the owner or operations lead, mostly for reviewing the daily briefing and approving drafts at Administrator tier. We walk you through that in the kickoff call. It takes about ten minutes to get familiar with.

Yes. The specifics:

• Data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (Supabase AES-256).
• Multi-tenant isolation at the database level: every operational row carries a tenant_id, 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 don’t store the credentials for the tools we connect to, only the OAuth tokens, which can be revoked by you at any time in those tools.
• Audit log records every action the Business Butler takes against your data, retained for 12 months, available to you.

We’re not certified ISO 27001 today (we’re a small team), but the underlying infrastructure (Cloudflare, Supabase, Anthropic) 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 isn’t enough, we’ll flag this in Discovery and discuss what Bespoke would need to look like. Sometimes the honest answer is that Business Butler isn’t the right fit.

In the UK and EU. Specifically:

• Supabase (the operational data store) is configured to use the London (eu-west-2) region.
• Cloudflare Workers run at the edge, but the data they write goes to the same UK/EU stores.
• Anthropic Claude API requests are routed through the EU endpoint.
• Twilio voice and SMS for UK clients runs through the UK regions.

We don’t 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’ll scope this in Discovery and confirm we can meet it before you commit.

The principle is: only people who need access for delivery 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 (Cloudflare, Supabase, Anthropic): 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 the Business Butler takes against your data plus every Time Back employee access. We don’t 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.