Automations

The admin nobody should still be doing by hand.

Chasing quotes. Retyping the same reply. Copying figures from an email into a sheet. Quiet, daily work, and the easiest thing in your business to hand to a machine.

Built with

n8n

Gmail & Outlook

Claude

Fixed price£750one job, start to finish: one trigger, one outcome

Typical build1–2 weeksfrom brief to running

Running costAbout £20/moyour own n8n instance, paid to the host, not to me

5,671 runs of my own automations in the fourteen days to 19 August 2026. 557 failed, and every one of them told me before it told anybody else. Almost all of that batch came from one expired Google credential, which took down every job that touched it. That is exactly the thing the alert exists to catch.

Inbox Agent

New Email (Outlook)

Get Sent Examples

Classify & Draft

Claude (Anthropic)

Structured Output

Label Email

Needs a reply?

Create Threaded Reply

Everything on this page is actually running.

Most people selling automation show a diagram they drew for the pitch. These are generated from the live workflow files: the boxes, names and wiring are exactly what runs, and eight of them keep my own business moving while I sleep.

Why that matters: I built these for myself before selling one to anybody. When something broke, it broke on me first.

Every automation is the same four moves.

Once you see the shape, you start spotting the jobs in your own week that fit it. That is usually the most useful hour of the first call.

01 · TriggerSomething happens

An email arrives, a form is filled in, or the clock hits 07:30. It wakes up on its own.

02 · FetchIt gathers the facts

It reads the sheet, the inbox, the order. Read-only wherever possible, so it can look without breaking anything.

03 · DecideIt applies your rules

Plain logic where the rule is clear, and AI where judgement is needed: is this a complaint or an order, is this urgent, what is this person actually asking.

04 · ActIt does the boring part

Drafts the reply, updates the row, files the record, sends you the one message that actually needed your attention.

Two of them, drawn exactly as they run.

Press run on either one and watch it go through, node by node, the way it does at 03:45. Each replaced a job somebody used to do by hand.

Your inbox, already drafted

Every email that lands is read, sorted and given a draft reply in your own voice, learned from the emails you have actually sent. You open your inbox to answers waiting, not questions.

ReplacedReading every email as it arrived and writing the first version of each reply by hand, first thing, every day.

Overnight tidy

Nightly 03:45

Manual

Read

Sort

Write Back

Why it sounds like youIt reads your recent sent mail and copies your tone, so drafts stop sounding like a robot wrote them

The safety ruleIt writes drafts. It never sends. You always press the button

Every reply read, sorted and flagged

Every fifteen minutes it checks what came back, works out which replies actually need you and which are noise, and flags only the ones worth your attention. Nothing gets answered on your behalf.

ReplacedOpening the inbox every hour or so to see whether anything had come back, and deciding each time whether it mattered.

Reply triage

Every 15 min

Get Unread

Read Queue

Match Senders

Classify Prep

Claude Classify

Merge Class

Update Row

Any Reply

Alert Oli

Costs nothing when idleIf no reply matches, it stops before it ever calls the AI. Quiet days are free

You stay in chargeIt classifies and alerts. It has never sent a reply on my behalf and it cannot

Both of those replaced a job somebody used to do by hand.

Tell me the job £750 per automation · one trigger, one outcome

The ones owner-run businesses ask for most.

You do not need to know what is possible. Tell me which part of your week you resent, and I will tell you whether a machine can take it.

QuotesThe quote chaser

Quote goes out, nothing comes back. Day three and day ten it writes the nudge in your words and puts it in front of you to send. Once you have read a few and trust them, you can let it send on its own. It stops the moment they reply.

EnquiriesEnquiry to job sheet

Web form, email or phone note becomes a row on the job sheet with the right fields filled in, so nothing lives only in someone's head.

InvoicesThe debtor list, emailed to you

Every Monday: who owes you, how long, what changed since last week. The chase list, not the ledger.

ReportingThe weekly summary

The numbers you check manually every week, pulled, checked and written up before you sit down.

RemindersThe nudge you do not have to remember

Renewals, services, inspections, subscriptions. The dates you keep in your head go in one list, and the reminder is drafted and waiting on time whether you remembered or not.

ReceiptsFiled the moment they arrive

A photo or a forwarded email becomes a coded, filed entry against the right job, so the month-end scramble stops being a scramble.

SuppliersOrder and delivery matching

Confirmations read as they arrive, matched to the order, flagged when the price or the date does not agree.

AnythingThe one you already thought of

Most owners already know the job they would hand over first. That one, usually. Tell me on the call.

Recognise one of these? That is the one to start with.

Tell me the job £750 per automation · one trigger, one outcome

Some jobs are one thing. Others are a system.

Everything above is the first kind: one trigger, one outcome, quoted from a phone call. Not everything fits that shape, and if yours does not, you are still in the right place.

One job £750

One trigger, one outcome. It runs the same way every time. If you can describe it as “when this happens, do that”, it is this one.

Quote goes unanswered, so it drafts the chase
Enquiry arrives, so it becomes a row on the job sheet
Monday comes, so the debtor list lands in your inbox

Fixed price, quoted before any work starts

More than one job Let’s talk it through

Some work pulls on several systems at once, has to weigh something up rather than follow a rule, and needs a person to see it before anything leaves the building. That is a proper workflow, and it is worth twenty minutes on a call rather than a number on a web page.

Supplier invoice arrives, gets matched to the order, and anything that does not agree is flagged for approval rather than paid
Enquiry arrives, gets checked against three systems to see whether they are already a customer, then routed and drafted accordingly
Quote is chased, and escalated to you only once it has gone quiet past the point where it usually goes cold

Book a call about it Scoped and priced in writing before anything is agreed

If the rules turn out to be predictable, it is the £750 one and it costs you less. I would rather tell you that on the call than build the expensive version of a job that did not need it. Most of what people describe as complicated turns out to be one job with a lot of exceptions attached, and exceptions are cheap.

This kind of work also gets simpler once your systems are joined up, because the workflow can read one place instead of five. If a systems audit or a dashboard build has already happened, most of the hard part is already done.

How I build them, and what I refuse to do.

Rule 01

A machine drafts. A person decides.

By default nothing I build sends an email, quotes a price or commits to a customer without a human pressing the button. The one time it gets it wrong, it goes out under your name.

Except

Internal alerts to you. Those it sends freely, because that is the entire point of them.

Rule 02

It can look. It mostly cannot touch.

Connections are read-only unless writing is the entire job. A system that cannot change your figures cannot corrupt them, which is why this is the default rather than an option.

Except

Where writing is the job it was built for. Even then it writes to its own sheet or its own table, never over your source of truth.

And when it is finished, it moves to you.

01 · BuildMade on my system first

Built and proven against real traffic on my bench. You are not paying for experiments on your accounts.

02 · ShipMoved into your own n8n

Your own instance, hosted for about £20 a month or on a small server I can manage for you. From that moment the workflow is your property, running on your account, not mine.

03 · ConnectOne sitting, together

We sit down and your accounts sign in on your side: email, sheets, the accounts package. Your keys stay in your systems. I never hold a password.

04 · Hand overFiles, runbook, done

You keep the workflow files, a plain English runbook, and the list of what breaks if a password changes. Brief to running inside a fortnight.

When it breaks

You hear it from the system, not from a customer.

Things do stop. Passwords expire, an API goes down, somebody renames a column. What matters is not whether a workflow ever fails, it is how long it fails quietly for.

Every build I ship watches itself. If a step errors or a run does not finish, it stops, it does not half-do the job, and it tells me before it has a chance to tell you.

5,671 runs in the fourteen days to 19 August 2026

557 of those failed, and every one sent this

Both figures come from the n8n instance that runs these workflows. The failure count is on the page on purpose: a system that has never failed is one that has not run enough to know.

n8n · Reply triage 06:15

Workflow stopped: Reply triage

Failed at: Get Unread · step 2 of 9
Reason: Outlook token expired, authentication refused
Runs affected: 3 skipped, none part-completed
Your data: Untouched. Nothing was written or sent

Next run 06:30. It will keep failing and keep telling me until the connection is signed in again.

The format every build uses. Names and times shown are an example.

The questions I get asked before anyone signs anything.

How does it get onto my system?

I build it on my own n8n instance first, so you are never paying for my mistakes or watching a half-finished workflow sit in your account. When it does the job properly, the whole thing exports as a single file and imports into your n8n in about a minute.

That file holds the logic: the steps, the order they run in, the settings and the wording. It deliberately holds no passwords and no keys, because n8n stores those separately from the workflow. After the import the automation lives on your instance, under your account, and I do not need standing access to it.

How do my own accounts get connected, and who ends up holding the passwords?

One screen share, usually about twenty minutes, and you drive.

Anything with a sign-in button, so Google, Microsoft, Xero, Shopify, you connect by signing in on your own screen. What gets stored is a revocable token, not your password, and you can withdraw it from your own account settings at any time without asking me.

Anything that uses an API key instead, Stripe and most billing tools, you generate the key inside your own account and paste it into your own n8n. If it is easier for me to do the pasting, the key comes to me through a one-time link that expires after it is opened, never in an email.

Your n8n encrypts those credentials with a key held only by your instance, which is the reason the exported workflow has none of them in it. I never hold a password of yours, and if we stop working together there is nothing of mine to remove.

What counts as one automation?

One job, start to finish: one trigger, one outcome. The quote chaser is one. The debtor list is another. If it needs two things to happen on two different schedules, it is two, and I will say so before you pay for either.

What happens if it breaks?

Every build ships with a failsafe that shouts when something stops, so you find out from the system rather than from a customer. Anything I built that breaks by itself, I fix.

What does it cost to run?

£750 to build. Around £20 a month for your own n8n instance, paid to the host, not to me. The workflow itself runs for under £1. Nothing else.

Can it email my customers on its own?

Not unless you ask it to. It arrives drafting, not sending: it writes, flags and files, and you press the button. Internal alerts to you it sends freely, because that is the point of them.

Once you have read a few and they are right, you can promote a job to send on its own. That tends to make sense for reminders, chases and anything routine, and to be a bad idea for the emails that carry a relationship. You decide which is which, per job, and it is written into the build.

Can I change it later?

The workflow lives in your n8n, not mine. You can edit it, pause it, or hand it to somebody else. Small changes I do at no charge; anything that is really a new job gets quoted as one.

What do you need from me?

Twenty minutes to describe the job, then the one sitting above where you sign in to your own accounts on your side. After that, nothing until you want something changed.

Where this usually leads.

Often firstThe spreadsheet auditAutomating a broken process just makes it break faster. If the sheet underneath is wrong, we fix that first. £300, fixed.The audit → UnderneathConnecting your dataMost automations need to read something. This is how your systems get plugged together, read-only and overnight.How it connects → The big oneThe dashboardOnce the plumbing exists, the same data can answer the questions you ask every Monday, answered every morning by 07:00.The dashboard →

Tell me the job you'd hand over first.

Twenty minutes. If a machine can take it off you, I will tell you what it costs. If it cannot, I will tell you that instead.

Book an intro call

£750 fixed per automation · quoted before any work starts