Automating and the immediate future

My new year was ushered with a renewed interest in delving deeper into spreadsheets, automation and learning programming script. These are all boring but vital skills to learn and develop as a small business. It's too expensive and slow to outsource so in order to save time and money, I decided to dive in by learning and copying examples provided by programming blogs, websites and videos. A lot of time was spent sifting through the available info and after selecting the relevant program, formats and function, it was time to call up the script editor to start writing functions(); and get the spreadsheet to track the business health up and going.

I wanted to build a low-no cost solution for my small business, mostly to comply with Tax Return requirements but also as a tool to let me know how the business was doing and whether this was something worth pursuing.

The project started with the building of a CRUD CRM system. CRUD is the acronym for "create, read, update, and delete" which is a database where I keep the relevant details of clients and CRM is the acronym for "customer relationship management" to record individual clients' needs.

Of course, these can be manually added to a spreadsheet but using examples and instructionals I found online, I built a side bar and a form which allows a new user to enter the data by themselves, then have the data moved to a dedicated CRUD sheet which is automatically sorted alphabetically.

The spread sheet also serves as a single entry cash ledger to record business activities, with a side panel making recording every transaction easier. A linked page leads it to automatically generate an official receipt, which sums up all the transactions for each client in a given month and sorted by month in a PDF receipt which can be emailed to each individual client. One of the biggest challenges I faced building this was the formatting to omit empty rows but that's going under the hood stuff which will bore you.

I'm currently in the process of building a more expressive dashboard to see the business' health at a glance and looking for a solution where each client can go to a webpage, enter their unique ID which will generate the official receipt in PDF and automatically email it to them on demand, all at low or no cost.

My exposure to all of this was very limited a few months ago, having learnt some basic Excel functions back in university, and for the most part, that knowledge is outdated compared with what I can do now. I had no prior training JavaScript coding, which is the language used in Google Script to code functions to tell Google Sheets to perform certain tasks. Back in the day, I was a self-taught HTML 1.0 coder, learning from thick books and designing websites on notepad, writing out every line of script, doing the copywriting and taking images with, by today's standards, very low res- poor image quality digital cameras of the day. But I learnt that it could be done, and with the help of videos, and AI tools like Chat GPT, a few of the spreadsheet functions and Java Script problems were solved.

I forgot to mention I also started to play around with some AI programming and writing solutions, as well as AI image creations. The use of AI requires the effective use of description to enable the AI to generate the best or most appropriate solution, and this skill as I recently learnt is called "prompt engineering". Perhaps that will be my next chapter. In the meantime, it's back to the keyboard for more coding.

The point of all this is, if you are looking for a solution for your own small business and are too busy or not motivated to program your own, get in touch with me and we can work out something for you.

If you are not interested or feel overwhelmed by the use of AI, Java Script coding and setting up a functional spreadsheet as I was initially get in touch.