Lazyfy your life
I help companies „lazyfy“ their processes by adding automation to the process workflow. You start your company by doing a lot of tasks manually, but as time passes more and more tasks require a manual process and are then becoming time vampires, sucking up the time you could use to work on your business.
We’ve all been there, the frustration of these multiple small tasks adding up to multiple days wasted, tasks that could be handed over to our beloved computers to process them automatically, that’s why they are here after all, to simplify our lives.
Example of extracting data from invoices
Let’s take the process of the invoices you receive and prepare them to be sent to your accountant. You go diving into your email mailbox for all invoices, hoping you didn’t overlook one, but then you need to open each PDF and extract data like invoice number, invoice date, amounts, supplier, and so on. Then take all this data, add it to a spreadsheet in preparation for the accountant, and finally send all of it to your accountant. It doesn’t take long, for one or two invoices, but add multiple invoices together, month after month doing the same repetitive and boring task. The result will be frustration and errors because of course you want to do more exciting things, that’s why you started your business right?
This is a perfect case that must be passed over to an automated process. At the end of the month, you have all invoices nicely sorted in a sheet view, with all the data extracted and PDF invoices attached to each record. You can now easily export this for an accountant or even automatically have it sent to them, keep track of invoices you have to pay, know how much money you will spend in the next weeks, and gather data about spending on suppliers. This all now happens automatically, you can take this bit of extra time to drink a coffee, write new content for your website, or just leave the office early to take a nap.
You can read How I started my path to automation and understand what led me to think this way.
How it works
This is however just one example of an automated process. Every business is different and has its own unique processes in addition to these processes that are common among many companies.
Identifying processes based on you SOPs
The best way is to go through your SOPs (standard operating procedures) - you do have your processes documented right? Don‘t fear if this documentation is missing, I‘ve been there and can help you get this documentation in place.
Identifying processes that are not documented
To identify these processes that are not documented, I like to just watch over your shoulder what you are doing and how you are doing things and then set up an automation for it. Sometimes even doing the job itself by hand helps me to understand your workflow and come up with improvements and automations.
It‘s crucial to talk and look and how the people doing these tasks are doing them and not management which mostly has little to do with the day-to-day tasks. Put me together with your team, I will work with them to identify undocumented processes, create SOP which will help train new hires, and then automate as much as possible so your employees have more time for better and more exciting tasks.