I’m Pretty Old But Can Still Do This Stuff

Hey Clief Notes fam! 👋 I'm Ray and I'm stoked to be here. That last sentence is 100% true but I’m 63 years old so don’t use the word stoked, but it was in the template so I’m gonna leave it in 😁

🙋 A little about me:

I look after the finances for 2 small companies. One, a street food company, loves ICM even though they have no clue what it is. I get to play with all their data to see what we can create with it.

I joined Clief Notes back in April. I watched a lot of the lessons and went away to play around with folders. I keep coming back when I get stuck but probably should spend more time in here.

🎯 My current goal:

I’m probably like a lot of people in here, I can see the potential that ICM offers but haven’t figured out how to make a business out of it yet. That’s what I’m aiming for…

💪 What I'm currently building/working on:

The first process I automated was a production sheet for the kitchen.

The old way…

Email orders arrived and the products, production dates, and purchase order numbers were manually entered into the sheet. This sheet became the source of truth that the Invoices and shipping labels were created from.

About 50 customers, ~100 orders per week, and 1000’s of data points all being manually entered into an Excel sheet. Invoices were created manually, as were the shipping labels. This was not just time-consuming, it also resulted in a ton of mistakes being made every week.

The new way…

Email orders arrive, and go into their weekly folder. Claude reads them and creates the production sheet. When needed, it spits out CSVs that get uploaded to our CRM to create the invoices and labels.

The old way took 2 full days for someone to complete, a lot of that time was unpicking the mistakes that got spotted then editing invoices, labels etc. but mistakes still got through.

The new way takes less than 1 hour per week and we’ve only had 1 mistake in the last 4 months. That was down to a human (me) losing an email.

We’re introducing other tools as well, a time/vacation tool that keeps track of everything for our payroll. An ingredients/recipe tool that tells the kitchen what it needs to buy to fulfil orders and how much it can spend. And others…

🤔 My biggest struggle or question right now:

Because I don’t work in tech and have never coded anything I think the thing I’m struggling with most is twofold…

1. Everything is kind of semi-automated now, order emails have to be manually added to their folder, which was what caused the one human-induced mistake I mentioned earlier. I’m pretty sure this can be overcome, just need to figure out how.

2. Everything lives on my machine right now which is fine but at some stage I need to share it. Haven’t worked out how that’s gonna happen yet either.

Let's get it! 🚀

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I’m Pretty Old But Can Still Do This Stuff