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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?

#51

Post by twunde »

blunte wrote: post #38

I would love to know how to deal with all the various electronic invoices I receive from different services (periodically and one-off, but especially the periodic). When trying to keep up with a dozen active domains/companies and associated services, I end up spending half of my time managing logins, searching for invoices (at quarterly tax time), etc. It's really at the point where I'd have better quality of life ma…

There are two things that might be helpful for you. 1) A password manager like onepassword or lastpass would make managing logins much easier (and more secure). 2) Take a look at accounting software, especially ones that support importing POs (purchase orders). You can also take a look at some services that manage your accounting needs for you

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

#52

Post by nzoschke »

AWS, particularly Lambda, step functions and budgets.

The business is a marketplace addon.

Lambda functions handle the webhooks to add, upgrade or remove the addon.

Step functions handle guiding new users through onboarding, by sending email reminders automatically re-configuring the service based on customer actions.

Budgets make sure a customer is not using more resources than they are paying for, and send email alerts to me and customers at various usage amounts.

I have extracted a lot of my AWS and Lambda software into an open source boilerplate app:

https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas

It's amazing how little code and operations this business requires!

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

#54

Post by napolux »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #43
napolux wrote: post #41

Time to shine. :-) I have a Rasperry Pi sitting at home, which is running Chrome headless to scrap some webpages on a 2/3 hours interval between 8am and 11pm, stores the data scraped on a Redis instance on the same machine, then with a PHP script I push these data in another interval straight on a FB page via IFTTT because I'm to lazy to implement the FB auth myself or use more than a POST request.

How does this process relate to your business automation?

I can think of this as a “side” business.

But it’s a business, yes :-)

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

#55

Post by napolux »

yaseer wrote: post #42
napolux wrote: post #41

Time to shine. :-) I have a Rasperry Pi sitting at home, which is running Chrome headless to scrap some webpages on a 2/3 hours interval between 8am and 11pm, stores the data scraped on a Redis instance on the same machine, then with a PHP script I push these data in another interval straight on a FB page via IFTTT because I'm to lazy to implement the FB auth myself or use more than a POST request.

+1 for introducing a Raspberry Pi into the equation!

:-)

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

#59

Post by graeme »

blunte wrote: post #38

I would love to know how to deal with all the various electronic invoices I receive from different services (periodically and one-off, but especially the periodic). When trying to keep up with a dozen active domains/companies and associated services, I end up spending half of my time managing logins, searching for invoices (at quarterly tax time), etc. It's really at the point where I'd have better quality of life ma…

With my accountant/bookeeper we use hubdoc, receiptbank, and xero.

Hubdoc collects monthly invoices from a lot of services. (You have to login with them, but for less important services this is fine)

Receiptbank accepts invoices by email or scan. For other services which send by email I created autoforward rules. For others like amazon which have some personal and some business I filter into a folder and process periodically.

For paper invoices, you scan a photo and receipt bank extracts the relevant data. (It extracts this data with emailed documents too)

Xero puts it all together, and also autocalculates things like foreign exchange.

The best solution is probably a service like Bench though if it's available in your area: a cloud bookeeper.

Having one has greatly improved my life.

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

#60

Post by WhiteOwlLion »

tosbourn wrote: post #5

I use TextExpander for support / service emails and to pull up information quickly (VAT details, addresses, etc) Invoices and late payment reminders I've automated with my invoicing system (Crunch)

I use PhraseExpress (free version available) for answer e-mails as well. Gmail has boilerplate responses, but you can script PhraseExpress to retrieve data locally. So, if a customer is asking for an order, I can pull up details in the e-mail by doing a query locally.
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