Automating repetitive work

In every business there are a few things someone does exactly the same way every week. Copying orders from e-mail into a spreadsheet, sending reminders to those who have not paid, gathering documents for the accountant, copying data from one system into another.

They are small things that on their own are not worth mentioning. Together it tends to be a day a month.

How I find it

We go through a week together and write down what repeats in it. Not what could be automated in theory, but what you actually do and how much it costs you. Only then do we decide what is worth dealing with.

Sometimes it turns out nothing is worth automating and it is enough to change the order of the steps. I will tell you so straight, even when I get nothing for it.

What I build it on

On proven tools like n8n, Make or Zapier, which can connect things you already use without anything being retyped by hand. Where something those tools cannot do is needed, I write it.

More important than the tool, though, is that the process is understood correctly. Automating a bad process just makes it a faster bad process.