28% of French SME leaders spend at least 2 days a week on admin — appointments and follow-ups top the list of sacrificed tasks
The CPME (French SME employers' confederation) 2025 activity report, relayed on 11 May 2026, puts at 28% the share of SME leaders who spend at least two full days a week on administrative tasks instead of their core business. Appointments, follow-ups and deadlines to track top the list.
The figure confirms something already suspected but rarely measured this clearly: for nearly one leader in three, two working days a week disappear into tracking — who paid, who needs to renew what, who needs to show up when. It isn't a complex task, it's a repetitive, endless one: every week brings its own batch of follow-ups to redo and appointments to confirm.
AppH's Pack Accueil doesn't replace the business owner on a decision — it absorbs the mechanical part: confirming an appointment, following up before a renewal deadline, reminding someone of a document to bring, with a human keeping control over anything outside the expected pattern. Across an agency or network, that's exactly the repetitive slice — the one CPME puts at two days a week — that shrinks first.
For AppH
- Tracking appointments and renewal deadlines already exists in Pack Accueil's logic (KYC, licensing) — extending it to routine appointment reminders and follow-ups doesn't require a new module.
- The figure comes from an employers' confederation (CPME), not a software vendor selling the fix — it's an independent read of the problem, not a disguised sales pitch.
Against / the honest limit
- The 28% figure is an average across all SME sizes and sectors — CPME doesn't break out the share specific to multi-site agency networks with a physical front desk, AppH's target audience.
- AppH reminds and follows up, it never decides on the owner's behalf whether a follow-up should stop or a file is compliant — that stays a human call, every time.
What strikes us about this figure isn't the total (two days) — it's its regularity: not a one-off spike at year-end, a weight that comes back identical every week. A repetitive, predictable weight is exactly the one kind of task an assistant can absorb without risk — the opposite of a complex decision.
Reviewed by a human at AppH