Which Process Should You Document First?
Most owners stall here, not on the writing. Add each repeatable process, answer five quick questions about it, and this scores and ranks them so you know exactly which SOP to write first. Free, no signup, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Score a process
Your documentation order
Add a process on the left and your ranked order appears here.
You now know the order. The writing is the part that never actually happens.
The AI SOP Generator Kit gives you a mapped-out library of 50 SOPs across sales, operations, hiring, finance and admin — each one named, scoped and already put in priority order — plus the prompt pack that drafts any of them from a two-minute description, an editable Word template, and a rollout playbook for getting the team to actually follow them.
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How the scoring works
Every process gets a score out of 100 from five weighted factors. Frequency and cost of error carry the most weight, because those two are what turn a written procedure into recovered hours rather than a document nobody opens.
- How often it runs (weight 30%). A weekly task written down once pays you back fifty-two times a year. A yearly task pays you back once. Frequency is the single strongest reason to document something.
- Cost of getting it wrong (weight 25%). Payroll, invoicing, client handover and anything touching money or compliance sit here. The SOP is cheaper than the mistake.
- Delegation need (weight 20%). If you are about to hand a task to a new hire or a contractor, the SOP is the handover. Writing it after the handover means supervising the job twice.
- Owner-dependency (weight 15%). Anything that stops dead when one person is on holiday is a risk you are carrying personally.
- Interruption frequency (weight 10%). The questions you answer over and over are already a draft SOP. You are just delivering it verbally, one person at a time.
Anything scoring 70 or above is a Document now. Between 45 and 69 is Document soon. Below 45 is Later, and that is genuinely fine to leave undocumented while there is higher-value work on the list.
How to use the ranking once you have it
- Write the top three, not the top thirty. A short stack of SOPs your team actually uses beats a complete library nobody opens. Three is enough to prove the habit works.
- Draft each one in a single sitting. A first-pass SOP is a title, a purpose, a responsible role, the steps, and a quality check. Our free SOP generator formats it for you as you type, and the reasoning behind each field is in how to write an SOP.
- Have the next person run it without help. Whatever they get stuck on is the missing step. That single test will find more gaps than re-reading your own draft ever does.
- Re-score after a quarter. Priorities move as you hire, drop services or change tools. The list you build today will not be the list you have in six months.
If you would rather have AI produce the first draft from a rough description, there is a free copy-paste prompt in the best ChatGPT prompt for writing SOPs, and the wider workflow is in how to document business processes.
Don't know what to put on the list?
Start with what interrupts you. Anything you get asked about twice in a week is a candidate, and so is anything that only happens correctly when you are in the room. We ranked the usual starting set for most small businesses in 10 SOPs every small business should document first, and there are industry-specific starting lists further down this page.
Get the Kit — $19 See what's included →
A mapped-out library of 50 SOPs, already prioritised · Instant download · 7-day money-back guarantee
SOP priority scorer — frequently asked questions
Which business processes should I document first?
Document the processes that are done most often, cost the most when done wrong, and only exist in one person's head. A weekly task that breaks payroll if fumbled beats a yearly task nobody depends on. That is what this tool scores, so you start with the one that buys back the most time and risk.
How many SOPs does a small business actually need?
Most small businesses run on roughly fifteen to twenty-five repeatable procedures, not hundreds. The mistake is trying to document all of them at once. Rank them, write the top three, get those used by the team, then continue down the list.
Is the SOP priority scorer free?
Yes. It is completely free, needs no signup or email address, and has no usage limit. Everything runs inside your own browser, so nothing you type is uploaded or stored anywhere.
How does the scoring work?
Each process is scored out of 100 across five weighted factors: how often it runs, how costly a mistake is, whether you need to hand it to someone else, whether it stops when the owner is away, and how often people ask questions about it. Frequency and cost of error carry the most weight.