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

My best automating stuff story, though, is automating complaint letters to UK banks. We were pushing the limits of what the UK's Direct Debit system can handle, and as a result were seeing all the edge cases where banks got it wrong. One common one was banks accidentally charging back a payment twice, and each bank had their own, totally bespoke complaints procedure for getting in touch when that happened.

A couple of engineers and me spent a couple of days integrating with Lob and a fax provider whose name I forget to automatically write complaint letters every time the banks screwed up. Some of these were being sent to named individuals for all Direct Debit complaints related to RBS, for example.

Needless to say, the banks fixed the problems that were causing us to need to complain soon enough. :-)

Invoices and late payment reminders I've automated with my invoicing system (Crunch)

So what we did, was on the new projects we started using DeployBot, which was very nice especially for the development team. Then we started to see what can we do on the legacy projects and once we have more time from other projects we tackle one older project at a time where we automate at least parts of it.

It can be a very annoying process especially if you have people in your team who where used at a certain style of the process, but I think in the long run it was worth it.

Our automation workflow is build on as many standard tools as we can find, because inventing it here costs a lot of money and we're not experts at it. So it looks smart to use what exists as smart as we can. We take vendor ISOs from microsoft, linux, et cetera and use Packer/Vagrant to build them up inside a vSphere cluster. Packer is starting to get really good support for ESX 6.5, which means we can build right off a datastore and flip the template directly into our orchestration suite for "purchase". Our process is executed in Jenkins Multibranch Pipeline. Our sysadmin-turning-developers are learning a lot this year, and the Jenkins Pipeline is a great way to shield them from details they are free to know but don't have the time for.

The core of our build environment is some reflective shell script that becomes aware of its environment as it is loaded. We're able to abstract across environments, datacenters, et al just by some clever situational awareness. The basics always end up being the most valuable, and our little ecosystem orbiting around a pile of terse, self-documenting shell scripts that any sysadmin can understand has been a successful gambit.

- Python/PHP/Geektool. Another 5 or so processes running that automate analysis and reporting of sales, competitor and economic data.

- Google App Scripting. Inbox cleaning & recirculation scripts running.

- Xero API & Python. Internal financial modeling and reporting.

If I had more time I'd automate it all and never step foot into the office again.

https://butlerfortrello.com/

No affiliation, just a happy user.

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.

My main work (non-dev) tools are Asana and Gmail. Asana is standalone for us (looking into adding it's Timeline which seem solid). Gmail have a couple of filters.

We use a finance setup where I just forward or email my receipts and have an accountant go through it and correct all the numbers, so this is automated for our part already (we pay about $200/mo for a personal accountant to go through it).

The one thing I think we spend too much time on is support issues. Customers will mail me personally, or my colleague, and it's hard to keep track of everything. We have a small team of students doing work on this and will soon have a custom web app solution built.

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 strings that I use often, like my Zoom and Calendly URLs.

I also developed Standard Operating Procedures for my business to “automate” certain decisions or protocols.

I try to eliminate before I automate. Does the thing really need doing, or can I find a way or reason to never have to do it again? For example, instead of routing Slack messages (I am in ~5 Slack orgs at any time) to my phone or email, I just set the expectation early that I will not check Slack frequently so if they need to reach me they should use email.

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.

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

Alpha http://www.reviewstatus.io

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)

We want to automate everything but we fight against the odds. In fact, I work with people that "don't believe in automation". I don't even understand the sentence.

BTW: Docker, Ansible, an in-house tool somewhat similar to OpenStack, Go and Python.

* Terraform to automate infrastructure such as github accounts, email accounts and AWS infrastructure and google calendars etc.

* Ansible for all provision and configuration management.

* Codeship as CI/CD for automatic packaging and deployment of docker images. Mainly using official base images with little to no repacking, only reconfiguration.

* StylyCI to correct codestyling

* AWS Autoscale groups for autoscaling.

* Makefiles for automating local environment setup and "nice-to-have" operations

2. Eliminating tasks that don't need to be done, or that I've over-engineered. I have an accountability partner, and while that has a lot to do with setting and meeting commitments, it probably has at least as much to do with eliminating pointless tasks. ("If you're trying to do X, what if you just did Y for now, and eliminated P, Q, R, S, etc?")

3. Self-serving/dog-fooding, but my own software tells me when prospects are interacting with lead magnets and proposals, and it automates most of the proposal process, so I can have more real conversations with people with fewer dials and less stress.

4. OmniFocus is great for getting tasks out of my head, showing me what I need to do, handling recurring tasks, etc. I'm not really using all the functionality to the max, and I should really do a more rigorous job with reviews, but it's super helpful. (I imagine other task managers have similar features, although this seems to work best for me.)

5. Automating customer support-- there are some customer support functions that require human intervention on the back end. If something comes up repeatedly, I write a script to automate it. Not a huge time savings, but instead of 5 minutes and a series of commands, it can be 30 seconds and something you can do from your phone. Not perfect, but helpful.

6. Delegation. Some things can't be eliminated or automated, but they can delegated. For a while, the biggest pain in my life was audio editing for my podcast. So I outsourced it. This is a form of "automation" that we often overlook, but it's been great. (I asked @gk1 more about Standard Operating Procedures on this thread, because this is where I see a lot of opportunities for more "automation".)

If you’re all in on Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc., there’s so much you can do with GAS. I’ve used it for creating automated emails with charts pulled from Sheets, scraping websites, analyzing my emails, rall sorts of stuff.