Most boring thing you automated this year?
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For me it's invoices. Every month I had to go on 15 different tools to download them for our accountant, I hated it. Now it runs alone. Not sexy but I'm quite happy with it.
What about you? And was it worth the time to set it up?
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Lead follow up timing. Small service businesses lose more work to slow replies than to bad marketing. Someone fills out a form at 9pm, nobody answers until the next afternoon, and they already booked the guy who called back first. We automated the first reply and the alert to the owner so every lead gets a response in minutes. Nothing clever about it. It just quietly wins jobs that used to disappear.
@trace_gordon same at the immigration firm I work at, people write to us from every time zone, often while we're asleep. we put an agent on the site that answers and books the consult. that's basically what we launched today as Site Agent, would love your take if you've got a minute
An agent slipped a confident number into a dashboard that nobody had actually measured, and a day went into debugging before anyone realized it was just static filler. Now an automated pre-commit grep flags every hardcoded placeholder and mock variable in agent-generated reports.
For me, it's invoice forwarding. I set up one rule per vendor in our mail server to automatically forward invoices to our bookkeeping tool.
It worked perfectly in the background until it didn't. A mail-server update wiped every single rule, and we only noticed on when nothing had reached our bookkeeping inbox.
The good thing is that I've now moved the rules into a separate file that survives server updates.
Was it worth the time? Absolutely. The biggest lesson was that automation needs monitoring.