Consultant admin automation, marked task by task by what stays in your hands.

It means the recurring back-office work that keeps the practice running but does not produce client deliverables: invoicing, time tracking export, late-invoice chases, CRM updates after a call, weekly status emails, monthly bookkeeping categorization, quarterly tax estimate calculation, annual rate review rollout, and the dozen small status writeups that add up to a Friday. The Phase 6 list in consulting-business-workflow.md (in this product's own internal docs) catalogs them by cadence. Most solos spend 10 to 15 hours a week on this work. Clone is built to take the part that passes the structural test described above, and to leave the rest visible so you do not lose track of the manual residue.

Because Clone's architecture is built on a Computer Agent layer (the third layer in src/components/architecture.tsx) that reads the screen and types, the same way you do. APIs are nice-to-have for speed but not required. That is why Clone can drive QuickBooks Desktop, a private Google Sheet you use as a CRM, a custom client portal, or a practice-management tool that has no Zapier integration. The only requirement is that the task is something you currently do, or could do, by clicking around on your laptop. If it requires a phone call to your accountant, a wet-ink signature, or a conversation in a coffee shop, it does not pass the test and stays manual.

Zapier and Make work at the API layer. They are excellent for systems that already speak a clean API and where the steps are deterministic. They are not great for the consulting back office because the consulting back office is mostly screen work: QuickBooks Desktop, a Google Sheet, a custom invoicing tab in your practice-management tool, Gmail with a specific label, Notion with a template you copied from a friend. Half the apps a solo consultant uses are not on the Zapier integration list, and the half that are still need branching logic for things like 'cc my assistant if the engagement is above $10K' or 'hold the invoice if hours exceed SOW estimate by 20%'. In Zapier you build those branches as filter steps. In Clone you say the rule once in plain English and Clone observes the pattern from your behavior and applies it forever.

A part-time VA for back-office costs $300 to $1,200 a month and works in business hours. Clone runs on the Mac at $49 a month and works at 8am, 11pm, or while you are on a flight. For deterministic recurring tasks (invoicing, CRM logging, status email drafts), Clone is faster, cheaper, and lower-latency. For tasks that need real human judgment (vetting a new prospect's references, calling a difficult client, writing the strategic recommendation paragraph at the end of a deliverable), a VA or a human associate is the right fit. The catalog above is not 'replace your VA', it is 'know which tasks are the VA's job and which tasks are software's job'.

Yes, that is the point. The tasks listed in the manual section above either require a human signal (your voice on the phone, your signature on paper) or your judgment (which clients to drop, which rate to raise, when to take the day off). Pretending those are automatable produces the bad version of automation: a system that sends a generic email to a client when what was needed was a five-minute phone call. The honest version of consultant admin automation is: take everything that passes the screen-click test, leave the rest visible to yourself, and do those few things by hand on the day they need to be done.

The review queue is the bridge between fully automated and fully manual. It is where Clone puts anything it drafted that hit one of your hold-for-review rules: invoices above your threshold, outreach with a tone deviation, scope-creep replies, time entries above SOW estimate. By the time you sit down at 9am Monday, the queue usually has zero or one item. You approve with a tap. The queue is what makes 'automated' safe: drafts never go out unattended on the cases you flagged. The matching architectural principle is 'always reviewable' in src/components/architecture.tsx, which says every action is logged and reversible.

Both. Because Clone reads the screen and types, it does not matter whether the app is Electron, native Mac, web, or a Citrix-shimmed practice-management tool from 2008. If it runs on your laptop and you can click in it, Clone can drive it. This is the practical consequence of the tool-agnostic-by-design principle in the architecture page: 'Clone uses the apps you already pay for. Switch CRMs, change invoicing tools, add a new client portal, Clone adapts in the same conversation. No re-wiring required.'

On the input side: a time tracker (Timely, Toggl, Harvest, Clockify), a transcript tool if your ritual needs call notes (tl;dv, Fireflies, Otter, native Zoom). On the work side: an invoicing tool (QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Xero, Wave), Gmail or Outlook for email, a CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Folk, Zoho, or a Google Sheet you use as one), a doc tool for retros and status (Notion, Google Docs, a Drive folder). The full landscape with prices is in tech-tools-landscape.md in this product's own internal docs, and Clone's only requirement is that the tool runs on your Mac.

Three to four weeks if you go one task per week. Week one, you pick the one that costs you the most hours and watch Clone do it. Week two, you let it run with you watching. Week three, you flip the schedule on. Week four, you add the next task. By the end of month one, most solo consultants report taking back 10 to 12 hours a week of admin. The setup section above lays out the cadence. The mechanism that makes it converge is the pattern observation loop: Clone watches your first two or three runs of a task and then asks you to confirm the rules it inferred from your behavior, instead of asking you to write them up front.

Client files, emails, contracts, and transcripts stay on your Mac. The architectural commitment is explicit in src/components/architecture.tsx: 'Clone operates your desktop apps from your desktop. Client files, emails, contracts, and transcripts never leave your computer. Your engagements stay confidential by default.' This is one of the things solo consultants tend to care about more than they say up front, because most clients sign NDAs that effectively forbid pushing engagement data through a third-party automation cloud.

Clone is $49 a month on Solo. The 14-day free trial does not require a credit card. The most common honest comparison: Zapier Professional at $73.50 a month for the task volume a full admin loop burns through, plus the apps you already pay for (QuickBooks, HubSpot, Notion, time tracker), plus a part-time VA for the glue Zapier cannot reach at $300 to $1,200 a month. Clone replaces the Zapier line and the VA-for-glue line, leaves the apps you already pay for unchanged, and is one fixed monthly cost.

Two safety nets. First, the review queue catches anything that hit a hold-for-review rule before it goes out. Second, every action Clone takes is logged in /clone/log/ on your Mac, with one-click rollback per action and full-run rollback per ritual. If a Monday run drafted a wrong invoice, you can roll back the QuickBooks draft, recall the Gmail message where recall is possible (Clone flags it explicitly when not), and revert the HubSpot stage moves. The principle in the architecture page is 'always reviewable', and it is the reason most users move from 'I am watching every run' to 'I review the queue at 9am' inside three weeks.