Every entrepreneur knows them: those tasks that "are part of it" but secretly eat up a huge amount of time. Retyping invoices, copying data from Excel to a web portal, compiling weekly reports.
It feels like work, but it's actually busywork.
The Case: The Logistics Company
Recently, we helped a logistics service provider. Every Monday morning, an employee, let's call him Mark, spent 4 hours processing trip sheets.
- Open PDF from supplier A.
- Copy trip data.
- Paste into Excel.
- Check for errors.
- Repeat for 50 suppliers.
That's 200 hours a year. Almost 5 work weeks lost to "Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V". And that's not mentioning the error proneness. One wrong comma and the billing is off.
The Solution: A 100-Line Script
We didn't build an expensive software package. We wrote a simple Python script that did exactly what Mark did, but in 3 seconds.
- The script reads all PDFs from a folder.
- It recognizes patterns and extracts the data.
- It generates a perfectly formatted Excel file.
- It flags any ambiguities for human review.
The Result
The impact was immediate:
- Time Savings: From 4 hours to 5 minutes (including review).
- Error Reduction: 100% accurate, every single time.
- Job Satisfaction: Mark no longer has to do robotic work and can focus on customer contact.
What is your "Monday Morning Nightmare"?
Automation doesn't have to be grand and sweeping. Often, the biggest wins are in automating small, repetitive tasks that unnoticedly swallow a lot of time.
Which process in your company is screaming for a script?