A win for a non-techie · Build Market Close

A win for a non-techie

I posted most of this on Clief Notes a few days ago, but my ‘win’ is equally down to what I’ve learned here from

so it should be in here as well. If it helps anyone in anyway, that’s great and if there are any questions, shoot…

I look after the finances for 2 small companies. One is a street food business that adores ICM even though they have no clue what it is and have even heard the term. They don’t pay me any extra for doing this, but I get to play with all their data to see what we can create with it.

I’m probably like a lot of people in here, I can see the potential that ICM offers but haven’t figured out how to make it pay me yet - I’ve kinda got the Build part, need to focus on Market/Close 😁

The first process I automated was a production sheet for the kitchen.

The old way…

Email orders arrived and the products, production dates, and purchase order numbers were manually entered into the sheet. This sheet became the source of truth that the Invoices and shipping labels were created from and for the amount of product to make each week.

About 50 customers, ~100 orders per week, and 1000’s of data points all being manually entered into an Excel sheet. Invoices were created manually, as were the shipping labels.

This was not just time-consuming, it also resulted in a ton of mistakes being made every week.

The new way…

Email orders arrive, and go into their weekly folder. Claude reads them and creates the production sheet. When needed, it spits out CSVs that get uploaded to our CRM to create the invoices and labels.

The old way took 2 full days for someone to complete, a lot of that time was spent unpicking the mistakes that got spotted then editing invoices, labels etc. we didn’t spot them all though and lots of them still got through.

The new way takes less than 1 hour per week and we’ve had only 1 mistake in the last 4 months. That was down to a human (me) losing an email.

We’re introducing other tools as well, a time/vacation tool that keeps track of everything for our payroll. An ingredients/recipe tool that tells the kitchen what it needs to buy to fulfil orders and how much it can spend. And others…

The more we use this the more help it becomes. We realised over the weekend that because it had all the production data and staff data that it could forecast how much labour the kitchen needs on any day. The tools now has a budget for daily hours. This was done before obviously, but it was in one person’s head - now everyone knows what it is.

I’m still saving emails to the weekly folder manually, I haven’t figured out how to automate that yet. But the tool is running, saving lots of time and headaches.

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A win for a non-techie