Automatingan SMB'sback office.
Follow-ups, invoices, data sync, reporting. The four tasks that take about ten hours a week, and how to win them back.
A good part of it you can automate yourself. We show you how, with real cases, and we tell you where an agency actually earns its place.
Get the full guide (PDF, 8 pages)
The four fronts in detail, the two client cases with figures, and the checklist - to keep on hand.
Do the maths once, properly.
Count the hours your team spends each week on data entry, manual follow-ups, copy-pasted reporting. Multiply by the loaded hourly cost, project over three years. That simple figure is enough to know what to automate first.
This guide walks you through the four most rewarding fronts, in order, with what you can do on your own starting tomorrow.
Your quotes often close on the follow-up, not the first send.
One quote in two closes on the follow-up. The catch: the manual follow-up is the first thing to drop when the week fills up. You forget, you chase too late, the prospect has already decided.
A follow-up whenever you remember - often never. No trace of who was chased, or when.
A sequence triggered on its own at D+2, D+5, D+10, by email or message. Every action logged in your CRM.
How: n8n wired to your CRM, a trigger on the quote status, message templates already written. The machine chases, you step back in the moment the prospect replies.
Set a D+3 reminder on every quote you send, with a ready-to-copy template. No tool, no budget, and you already pick up the quotes left hanging.
An invoice sent late is cash sitting in someone else's account.
Between the signed quote and the sent invoice, days often pass. Every day of delay pushes your payment back just as much. And few people chase unpaid invoices on time.
Invoice written by hand, sometimes forgotten. Unpaid invoices chased on a hunch, or never.
Invoice generated the moment the quote is signed. Automatic dunning at D+30. Nothing slips through.
How: Most invoicing tools already know how to generate the invoice from the signed quote: you just wire up the right trigger.
From 1 September 2026, every French company must be able to receive its invoices in electronic format through an approved platform. For SMBs, the obligation to issue arrives on 1 September 2027. Wiring this flow now, calmly, costs far less than in a rush.
Turn on automatic invoice generation from the signed quote. Most tools already support it.
Half a day of weekly reporting, or one automatic message.
Compiling the week's numbers means digging through the till, the spreadsheet, the management tool, and gluing it all back by hand. Half a day, sometimes more, every week, for a figure you look at for two minutes.
Manual export from each tool, copy-paste into a spreadsheet, formatting. Half a day gone.
The numbers come up on their own. One clear message every Monday, where you already look: Telegram, Slack or email.
Dream Donuts
Before us, a full day went into reporting every week: pulling figures from the till, gluing them by hand, formatting. We replaced all of it with an automatic Telegram message, fed by their till through n8n.
Thomas, the founder, puts it simply: they turned a corner.
Re-keying data from one tool to another is an agent's job.
One tool for orders, one for the catalog, one for accounting. In between, someone re-types. It's slow, and it creates errors you pay for later, in credit notes or annoyed customers.
Manual re-keying between two pieces of software. Errors, duplicates, evenings spent fixing.
An agent reads the source, structures it, and writes to the target on its own. You approve, you stop typing.
Pierre et Parquet
The catalog import was done by hand, whole evenings re-typing line by line, with the errors that come with it. We built an agent that handles the import into Odoo on its own, through the API. They approve, they no longer key in data.
Mathis Cottier sums it up: the agent handles the import on its own, no more evenings re-typing.
Five automations to start this month, without an agency.
You can begin on your own. Here's where to start, in order of payoff.
- 01An automatic D+3 reminder on every quote you send.
- 02The invoice generated on its own as soon as the quote is signed.
- 03A weekly report pushed automatically to Slack or Telegram.
- 04Dunning triggered on its own at D+30.
- 05Automatic sync between your till or CRM and your spreadsheet.
When you hit the technical wall, or the flow gets too tangled for a no-code tool, that's where we step in. We build the custom tool, and the code stays with you.
Let's look at your fronts together, in 30 minutes.
We pin down your three priorities and give you a concrete path to free up time. You leave with that plan, even if nothing follows.
And if we build: the code is yours from day one, the tool is delivered in 21 days.