| Over time, I have automated 95% of the accounting of my companies. I started with a simple script that scraped the bank's website to create tasks in Asana for each entry in the statement, the task being "you need to do the accounting for X thing". So I could mark as complete each entry as I grabbed the corresponding invoice and filled the spreadsheet I later on send to our accountant. Then I realized most of my invoices come by email, so I used Zapier and Gmail rules to find invoices and put them in a folder in Google Drive, which saved me more work. This was very useful to never forget to fill something in the accounting anymore, but escalated quickly... Later on, I wrote a bunch of scripts that read invoices from Google Drive, extract the necessary information and place it in the spreadsheet for my accountant, rename the files to a standardized format and complete the Asana tasks automatically. And there are more scripts, for example some services do not send you the invoice via email, but you can log in and download it, or the invoice information might be displayed on screen and if you want to keep it you need to print them out as PDF, so I wrote scripts for this. All of this became an amorphous collection of scripts that are tailor-made for me and probably would be of no use to anybody else, but definitely made my life simpler. I know there are a bunch of SaaS services now that do this for you, but when I started they were not there and the ones I tried need more manual work than the solution I have today. One little detail I noticed of my design and was totally accidental: since I made the scripts in steps and used Asana to keep track of which statement entries still needed attention, the "UI" is still Asana and the tasks can still be done manually. Therefore, my scripts do not need to cover all cases, which is great because it's not an all-or-nothing solution. |