A client of ours runs a small business here in Calgary, and every month their bookkeeping followed the same ritual: a shoebox-shaped pile of receipts (some scanned, some just phone photos taken in a parking lot), and an afternoon spent typing each one into a spreadsheet by hand. Vendor, items, total, tax, repeat. By the end of it they’d earned a coffee and a nap.
It’s the kind of task nobody ever puts on the calendar to fix, because on any given Tuesday it just doesn’t feel worth the trouble. It’s only once you add up the hours across a year that it stops looking small.
So we built them a workflow instead. Drop a receipt into a shared folder and it reads the vendor, pulls every line item, works out the total, sorts it into the right category, and breaks out the GST, then files all of it into a clean spreadsheet. You don’t have to type anything, or squint at a faded gas station receipt at 9pm trying to figure out if that’s a 3 or an 8.
A full day of work now takes a few minutes, and nobody touches a calculator. Take a look:
Receipts just happened to be this client’s headache. For someone else it’s timesheets, invoices, or whatever paperwork keeps stacking up on a desk. Either way, it’s usually the same shape: someone opens a document, reads it, and retypes what’s on it somewhere else. That’s often easier to automate than people expect.
So what’s the task your business dreads every month, the one that’s currently costing you more than it’s worth? Tell us about it and let’s see if we can make it disappear.