Going live tomorrow with an AI order management system I built for my father's steel distribution business.
What we're handling:
- Customer POs → auto-processing → QuickBooks
- 20-60 orders/day, $400-2000 each
- Vendor invoice matching & delivery confirmations
- Built with n8n, Airtable, AI matching logic
The implementation:
- New Airtable workspace where 2 employees can see all orders organized by status
- n8n workflows that watch Google Drive folders and auto-process new files
- AI parsing for customer POs, vendor invoices, and delivery tickets
- Automatic matching and data entry (replacing 5-6 hours of manual work daily)
- Telegram notifications to keep everyone in sync
Running parallel with the old system for safety, but still... real orders = real money = real consequences if something breaks.
[ For those who've deployed client systems: ] What ends up on your testing checklist that we always forget?
Already covering the obvious (backups, rollback plan, monitoring). What's the non-obvious stuff that bit you on day 1?