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Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

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Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#21

Post by petercooper »

Other than Zapier, Slack reminders are a huge help to us. We have reminders set up for all sorts of things, both recurring and adhoc. If you use Slack and don't use reminders, look into how it works, they are fantastic.

We also use https://sweep.cards/ which is from Amy Hoy, who many of you may know of. It's basically for things that don't go in a calendar but which are recurring in some fashion, such as doing payroll each month, weekly reviews, or even minor daily tasks you need to remember to do. It has group workflow for this stuff as well if there are multiple people who need to do a single piece of a recurring task.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#23

Post by contingencies »

Bank API integration, corporate credit card for partner and travel billing, custom accounting and supply-chain management systems with automatic machine translation, supplier shipment tracking, inventory and BOM tracking, github webhooks, github oauth.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#24

Post by k1ns »

I built a website test automation platform [0] that started out as an automation challenge for my other side projects. It has proven itself useful to others so I figured I'd turn it into my next adventure as its own business.

Automation is something that I believe to be a must-have for many areas of business. ETL work, data entry, data collection, testing, etc., can (mostly) be automated as they're all very replicable. This frees your hands to work on the more important aspects of your business/job.

[0] https://bastions.co

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#25

Post by Xt-6 »

I am building a small tool to try to automate all the nudging around pull requests. The dream is contact only the relevant people (as opposed to spam), in an asynchronous fashion to avoid interruption. Example: Asking to fix tests, remind them to do a review, asking to fix conflict with master, asking to re-review, etc.

Alpha http://www.reviewstatus.io

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#26

Post by hknd »

I have a old-school fashion company where employees meet with clients and they need to fill out a form with ~60 fields. Afterwards those form results need to be transformed and inserted into multiple other templates.

I've automated this via Apps Script: An employee just fills out the form, and everything else is done automatically. (and even more: the script also sends an invoice to the client, creates a calendar event for the employee and adds the order to an internal spreadsheet)

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#27

Post by yaseer »

hknd wrote: post #26

I have a old-school fashion company where employees meet with clients and they need to fill out a form with ~60 fields. Afterwards those form results need to be transformed and inserted into multiple other templates. I've automated this via Apps Script: An employee just fills out the form, and everything else is done automatically. (and even more: the script also sends an invoice to the client, creates a calendar eve…

Nice, I wasn't aware of Apps script, thanks! Seems like this should be more popular than it is

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#28

Post by reubenswartz »

gk1 wrote: post #20

I have a consulting business. I have a few basic zaps, like sending myself an email reminder every Monday to review goals. FreshBooks for automating recurring invoices and payment reminders. This one has saved me a lot of time: Calendly to let people schedule meetings on my calendar. I’ve set a very narrow availability window so that meetings are grouped into one afternoon. aText app to create shortcuts for long stri…

Nice. What do you use for your SOP? Can you give more details?

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#29

Post by jlebrech »

hknd wrote: post #26

I have a old-school fashion company where employees meet with clients and they need to fill out a form with ~60 fields. Afterwards those form results need to be transformed and inserted into multiple other templates. I've automated this via Apps Script: An employee just fills out the form, and everything else is done automatically. (and even more: the script also sends an invoice to the client, creates a calendar eve…

at some point you'll send employees out with ipads?

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#30

Post by gk1 »

reubenswartz wrote: post #28
gk1 wrote: post #20

I have a consulting business. I have a few basic zaps, like sending myself an email reminder every Monday to review goals. FreshBooks for automating recurring invoices and payment reminders. This one has saved me a lot of time: Calendly to let people schedule meetings on my calendar. I’ve set a very narrow availability window so that meetings are grouped into one afternoon. aText app to create shortcuts for long stri…

Nice. What do you use for your SOP? Can you give more details?

It’s just a doc that I printed out. The hardest part was actually coming up with it, and then narrowing it down to just the most important things so that the whole thing fits on one page. It’s partially inspired by Ray Dalio’s “Principles” book.

Examples:

- If not "hell yes" then "no."

- Everything can survive one hour.

- If it's $100 decide by Friday.

- No calls on Fridays.

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