What if it's an event that happens infrequently, say 2 times year? In such cases, it wouldn't be worthwhile to spend the time automating when it's easier/cheaper to take manual action.
No, automation is always the answer. When you are forced to formalize processes with code you invariably find all sorts of hidden assumptions. This has happened to me every single time I've tried to automate legacy manual processes. There are always hidden assumptions that are unearthed. Unearthing hidden assumptions is always worth the effort.
A hidden assumption behind what you wrote is that all automation is like the scripts you've written to automate your processes.
There are things which automating them would take lots of man-months and tens of thousands of dollars, so much that the effort is not worth it from the savings -- or from any "hidden assumptions" you discover.
You should also consider how much it costs you to miss a part of a process that is manually carried out but that could be automated. If it really expensive to miss something then automation might be a good idea even for simple tasks.
