111–116 of 116 posts
I use ScanBot to scan in all of my receipts and other important papers: https://scanbot.io/en/features.html I have it linked to Evernote, so that anything that I scan in (receipts from dining out, etc.) is waiting for me in Evernote by the time I make it home.
I automate extensively, but I don't use many modern/specialised tools just for automation. I tend to rely on general purpose scripting tools, templates, and programming with relevant APIs instead. For example, I write many simple programs, often just shell scripts, and I have a go-to set of popular libraries and system tools for most integration purposes. I use many types of triggers to start those activities, includ…
Some things we use them for:
* automate the bank payments to our suppliers (exporting the table format in SEPA XML format)
* tweet some of our evergreen blog posts every day (note these scripts run in the cloud, the spreadsheets do not even need to be open)
* assist in the formatting of our newsletters (we write sections in Markdown, the script formats and uploads images to our blog, uploads the finished article and schedules)
We also use Zapier extensively. One particular automation I'm really proud of is accounting: we use Zapier to collect invoice PDFs sent by email, later on I wrote some scripts using Selenium to also log in and download invoices from websites that do not send the PDF over email. This saved me tons of time. Then a small script downloads the bank statements and puts each line in an Asana task, this way I can do reconciliation: I find the PDF invoice for every entry in the bank and put them together. It is very easy to find out which invoices you didn't download yet, if an invoice still needs payment or if you were sent an unexpected invoice. Lately I have refined this further and automated some of the matchmaking too, using Apache PDFBox to read the content of the invoices.
As a growing business, we needed all the help for running our business smoothly. Here is an exhaustive list of all the best tools we needed:
1. For scheduling appointments- A calendar app like Google Calendar 2. For lead generation - A lead prospector tool like Agile CRM to generate leads through social media. 3. For project management - Trello 4. For cloud-based mobile communication - RingCentral 5. For email marketing - Mailchimp 6. For building landing pages - Unbounce 7. For social listening, scheduling - Hootsuite 8. For help desk support - Clickdesk 9. For SEO - Ahref, Moz 10. For competitor research - SEMRush 11. For automatically checking your grammar even while sending your emails - Grammarly 12. Google Analytics to observe website traffic. 13. For building websites - wiz Interestingly, Agile CRM covers most of the above necessary (the first 8 out of the 13 given) features on a single platform. So, when we came across this CRM, we thought we would start using this free tool to manage our customer relationships as well.
And instead of using 8 different tools It is the only comprehensive, end-to-end CRM that delivers sales, marketing and support automation to help small and medium businesses manage all parts of the customer journey, from a single platform, in order to drive sustainable, scalable growth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if you need to. Could you give some examples?
Could you give some examples? Sure. In fact, Zapier have a good example right on their home page, showing a connection between someone submitting a form to Wufoo and adding their email address to a MailChimp mailing list. For automation purposes, Wufoo can trigger a webhook when a form is submitted and MailChimp have a REST API that can be used to manage mailing lists. So, if I wanted to automate that sort of task, I…