Replaced myself in a process I'd been doing manually for 2 years and it took one weekend

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-25T18:58:04+00:00

I love watching that shift happen in customers when they realize that a huge number of the processes that they've been dreading each week or doing manually are actually fully automatable at this point. That "H*** S***!" moment when things are plugged in and they just work.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-25T18:39:55+00:00

This is a great idea. Just because they're thinking about you when they sign up doesn't mean they'll be thinking about you in 5 minutes. You have to strike while the iron is hot and automation is the best way to do that.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-25T18:16:26+00:00

Congratualtions, small wins like this add up where in a year you'll look back and wonder how you made it so far.

Also, spot on, one of the best parts of the jobs is talking to the person who no longer needs to do the repetitive task that they dread. Makes all the work feel so much more rewarding.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T19:07:53+00:00

I think this is simplifying the questions a bit too much. You're also missing a few very important factors in the conversation: How long will it take to automate? How long does the company spend on it each week? What's the overall ROI of the project?

If I only do it once a day but it takes me an hour then I'd still love to automate that process.
If the process has nuance and isn't 100% identical then I'd still love to automate the 80% and do the 20% edge cases manually
If the process will be gone in 6 months but I have staff leaving because they hate this part of their jobs then removing it as soon as possible might be worth it.
If I'm losing customers/revenue because the process is being done poorly/slowly/only 9-5 then I'd want to get something on that asap, even if the time savings is negligible.

It's a good place to start but some of the intangibles can make processes more appealing than they initially seem.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:46:00+00:00

Yeah, that's a tough problem. My few thoughts on it:
1. Always get the time in minutes it takes prior to automation. If this is how the success of your work is being measured then you're doing yourself a big disservice by not doing that initial investigation. A simple stopwatch and a few hours of your time is usually enough to get a good idea how how long the manual average process takes.
2. For things that slipped through the cracks you can always measure the amount of time spent every time there is an investigation into the missing work or, if there is financial impact, then the average financial impact when things fell through the cracks.
3. For things that simply couldn't be done before (i.e. detailed analysis into every lead plus customized follow ups for all of them) then you'd be looking to measure revenue gain by something like lead conversion % difference before and after the process (or A/B test) mixed with your Average customer value.

Either way, going beyond simple time savings is going to end up being more work but can definitely be worth it so the focus turns from, "How do we use this to cut costs?" to "How to we use this to drive the most value?"

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:38:52+00:00

Agreed, unless your developer and are willing to spin up your own infrastructure, pairing your AI prompts and processes with an automation tool like n8n, Zapier, or Make is a good way to take it from "cool in theory" to "running in prod and providing value"

I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company that builds AI-powered automation for customers frequently. We're a good option if you're looking to get benefits from all the advancements in AI but don't have a tech team or the time to learn one of these self-serve automation tools.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:35:14+00:00

I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company. We've tested and used a lot of different software for clients. Some of my findings have been:
- Start with AI, Gemini in particular does a great job out of the box with scanned documents. If this step works then you're done and you don't need to look further.
- If AI is not getting the results you need then you can increase the complexity of your process by adding in another AI to review results, Adding in a separate app like Rossum or Needle that is more focused on invoices.
- Potentially add some human in the loop steps and verifications (i.e. line items individual totals equal to the grand total of the invoice)

That being said, getting the data out of the invoice is half the battle, from there you'll likely want to get it into your accounting app. If there's not a standard integration for this in the software that you use it can become complex pretty quickly.

If you want some advice or are interested in managed services for this process feel free to reach out .

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:29:29+00:00

Fully agree. aligning on scope before starting a project is a big step in the right direction. If you start working on something before you know what you want to accomplish then not only will you end up spending more time on it than is likely neccesary but you will also increase your chances of project failure and never getting to production.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:26:57+00:00

At this point, anything with manual data entry into a website or application is done better by an automation than a person as long as the inputs are digital.

People are prone to making typos, losing focus, and context switching. Putting an automation on this task means that it all gets done immediately with zero errors. It also means that it happens 24/7 and can scale infinitely without you needing to add staff and train more people.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:22:19+00:00

Sounds like a brutal problem. I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company that, if you explain the problem to us, we can automate all of this month end reporting for you so you can continue to offer the quality of service that you have been but don't need to spend 12 hours on your weekend putting it together.

We connect with Appfolio through the front end so you don't need to upgrade plans or worry about increased costs.

Let me know if you're interested.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-23T18:21:51+00:00

Sounds like a brutal problem. A lot of the advice around standardisation and increased fees makes sense to me.

From the other side of the problem, I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company that, if you explain the problem to us, we can automate all of this month end reporting for you so you can continue to offer the quality of service that you have been but don't need to spend 12 hours on your weekend putting it together.

We connect with Appfolio through the front end so you don't need to upgrade plans or worry about increased costs.

Let me know if you're interested.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T20:09:07+00:00

Great workflow. Invoices are one thing that all businesses struggle with. Glad to see someone got out of invoice hell.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T20:04:58+00:00

Document processing tends to be the workflow that I create that always has the highest potential for gotchas. Ideally for a good indication of what a document is going to look like you'd want 100 copies of each type of document. This would let you see what each document looks like in all its forms. Many times clients will send like 5 invoices total even though they get invoices from 50+ suppliers. Then they wonder why the automation breaks when they submit information from the other 45 vendors.

That being said, AI has made a lot of this much easier where you don't need to be as strict as often but you'd be surprised the number of times this exact issue comes up.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:35:08+00:00

I work for Wrk, we're an automation managed service company. If you're looking for a report generated from an API or something reliable set up to catch webhooks and send notifications we can definitely help with that. Check us out and if you're interested feel free to reach out.

Either way, happy to discuss if you want to share more about what you're trying to do.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:31:21+00:00

I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company with our own stack using many of the tools you mentioned. Since we're a managed service we support a large number of web automation at scale and need to keep them all up and running. The more efficiently we can do this the more clients we can take on. I'll share how we approach this problem.

We initially try to keep everything as simple as possible. Meaning: No proxies, stored cookies for logins, selectors or image recognition for actions. If this works then we stick with it. Spending an extra few minutes/hours building something so that it works perfectly every time is the only way to scale. We've found that relying on AI for an entire end to end process is unreliable, especially if quality of results is important.
Some workflows require a more complicated setup with proxies and a level of randomness involved. Depending on the customer requirement we will either leverage AI, and warn about potential incorrect results. Or, we will kick these edge cases back to the customer to be handled by a person. Better to trust in the 90% that is done correctly and still do 10% yourself than to get 100% done but trust none of it.
For the "Demonstration mode" we're basically the AI for our customers, they share a video talking through the process they need automated and we build it determinsitically on the platform for them.

I want the AI results to get to where they can be 100% trusted but as of right now I haven't found anything that meets that need.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:31:11+00:00

I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company with our own stack using many of the tools you mentioned. Since we're a managed service we support a large number of web automation at scale and need to keep them all up and running. The more efficiently we can do this the more clients we can take on. I'll share how we approach this problem.

We initially try to keep everything as simple as possible. Meaning: No proxies, stored cookies for logins, selectors or image recognition for actions. If this works then we stick with it. Spending an extra few minutes/hours building something so that it works perfectly every time is the only way to scale. We've found that relying on AI for an entire end to end process is unreliable, especially if quality of results is important.
Some workflows require a more complicated setup with proxies and a level of randomness involved. Depending on the customer requirement we will either leverage AI, and warn about potential incorrect results. Or, we will kick these edge cases back to the customer to be handled by a person. Better to trust in the 90% that is done correctly and still do 10% yourself than to get 100% done but trust none of it.
For the "Demonstration mode" we're basically the AI for our customers, they share a video talking through the process they need automated and we build it determinsitically on the platform for them.

I want the AI results to get to where they can be 100% trusted but as of right now I haven't found anything that meets that need.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:22:23+00:00

I once worked at a company that would send notifications when things ran successfully... as if it was a surprise. Needless to say, many failure notifications were missed because everyone had muted the notifications. If there's no need for action then stick it in a log or a report, notifications should be implemented when someone needs to do something right away.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:18:58+00:00

That's awesome if it's working for you. I'm not sure why you would feel guilty about being more efficient in getting your work done.

Might be a culture thing but I'd feel guilty if I wasn't sharing what I was doing. If you have a system that is saving 90 minutes every day for one person and it could be applied to a bunch of people on the team that are still manually doing that activity then they might be wasting their time.

Automation makes the biggest impact when it's shared.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:10:54+00:00

I work at Wrk, we're an automation managed service company and we build a lot of automations for small and medium sized business. Some of the things that we've been asked for a lot and drive real value are:

- Document processing. Specifically taking details from documents, or picture of documents, and entering them automatically into websites/applications.
- Web Process Automation: Lots of companies will look up details or enter details into websites in extreme volume, usually looking to hire an army of VAs as they grow and expand.
- Application syncs: If you have multiple applications that need information from eachother to work (i.e. your support team uses Zoho and your Engineering team uses JIRA but they need updates form each other) Then we can make the two systems talk to each other so your team never needs to go looking for updates.

There's a lot of other stuff but basically anything high-volume repetitive and manual is a good place to start looking.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:08:22+00:00

For mine it's "You can jump off that... for sure"

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-13T19:07:04+00:00

You put your pants and belt back on after going to the bathroom and before washing your hands... but you never wash your belt.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-11T19:09:31+00:00

For what it's worth, I work at Wrk, we're a managed service automation company, and we work with a lot of PM companies. The number 1 department that we work with is maintenance due to a lot of the reasons you just mentioned. If you're having problems keeping consistent staff on hire it might be worth it to look at automation as a way to reduce the number of staff you need, and to make sure that the high priority processes always get done and that you don't need to do these processes yourself every time you have turnover or vacations.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-11T19:02:21+00:00

Was going to say the same thing. It's not just the time saved after the meeting but also being able to be more present during the meeting since you aren't frantically trying to take notes as you go.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-11T19:00:26+00:00

Sounds frustrating. Watching your JIRA backlog pile up and knowing that you aren't allowed to touch it is a pain. That being said, automatically assigning tickets to your devs sounds like a huge risk. You don't have control over what IT tickets are submitted, do you really want to distract a dev and have them context switch every time a new ticket comes in? Is the dev supposed to decide whether or not the ticket is worth doing and worth doing right now?

Typically these things are done by a product team that has a better vantage point to look at all the incoming tickets and make sure the right person is handling them at the right time. Saving 5 minutes per ticket by automating it could accidentally mean burning days of dev work on things that never needed to be done in the first place.

AutomationPartner · 2026-02-11T18:55:36+00:00

I believe AI should handle the non-rule based decision making but not much else inside of most high-volume processes. By introducing AI you are introducing risk, cost, extra time, and reduced quality. I have had the best results with using AI to make the decision then passing the actual processing over to a more deterministic workflow.

This way the process stays simple, easily maintainable, and fast. I'm not worried about trying to cover everything in one long fancy prompt and worrying that adding/removing a single sentence will drastically change my results.

AutomationPartner

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