Monday, a quarter to nine
Somebody arrives, takes off their jacket, opens the business software before even the coffee, because that spreadsheet has to go out by midday and it takes a good two hours
The numbers sit in three different places, one part comes out of the business software on a screen that has to be filtered by hand every time, one part arrives by email from the warehouse in an attachment that changes its name every week, the last one is inside a spreadsheet kept up to date by a single person, and on Monday that person is sometimes on holiday
Then you paste, you straighten the columns that have shifted, you check that the totals add up, you color in red whatever is under the threshold, you attach it, you write a couple of lines to go with it, you send it
By half past eleven it's done, and it's been like this for three years
Why a recurring report weighs more than it looks
Two hours a week, read on their own, frighten nobody, the trouble is that they're always the same two hours, always on Monday, always at the moment when the phone calls of the week just started are coming in as well
And they aren't just any two hours, they're two hours of a person who knows that round of data, so you pay for them twice, once in salary and once in everything that person isn't doing while they copy columns
There's the fragile part too, a recurring report built by hand depends on a single head, and when that head is away on Monday the spreadsheet goes out late, or it goes out wrong, or it doesn't go out and nobody notices until Wednesday
The awkward question to ask before anything else
Before automating a report, go to the people who receive it and ask them whether they open it, not whether they need it, whether they open it
The difference is enormous, because almost nobody will ever tell you a report is no use, while to the question of when they last looked at it the answer comes back honest, and often embarrassed
Automating a report nobody reads means paying a monthly fee to carry on not reading it, punctually this time, and it's the most elegant way I know of throwing money away
It happens that this question ends the job before it starts, the report gets switched off, nobody protests, you have saved two hours a week without automating anything, and that's perfectly fine
The opposite happens too, that somebody really does open it but only to look at three lines, and then the spreadsheet to automate isn't the one you have now, it's a shorter version that until now nobody had the time to rethink
How Monday morning comes undone
When the report really is needed, an automation goes and fetches the data where it sits, opens the business software and the right screen with the filters always the same, the way an operator would, picks the attachment out of the mailbox and reads it even when the name changes, logs into the portal if part of the numbers sit there, opens the shared spreadsheet and pulls out the column it needs
Then it puts the file together in the format you use now, with the same columns, the same thresholds and the same red, and sends it to the people who have to receive it at the time it has to arrive
Your business software doesn't change and neither does the spreadsheet, whoever receives it has nothing to learn, they open Monday's attachment and find the usual one, only without somebody having spent the morning building it
When something doesn't add up the report doesn't go out
An honest automation stops when it doesn't like the numbers, if the warehouse hasn't sent the attachment, if a total doesn't match the sum of the lines, if an item that has always been there has vanished this week, the spreadsheet doesn't go out and an alert reaches you
Without that brake the trust doesn't last long, because an automatic report that sends the file anyway, wrong but on time, does more damage than the person who used to build it by hand on Monday and at least saw that something was odd
Where you start
To tell whether your recurring report can be undone it takes very little, which places you take the numbers from, which steps the person goes through from opening the first program to sending the email, and who really receives it
A screen recording of that Monday, with no sensitive data in it, says more than half an hour of explanations, and if it turns out that nobody reads the report we tell you, before the quote, not after
And if you want an idea of what those hours weigh over a year, Work out the savings has the multiplication ready made, and it stays an estimate, not a promise