Doing the work

Most of the typing in a business is the same few steps, repeated all day. This page explains how those steps run on their own once we have set them up.

What a workflow is

A workflow is a few steps that happen in the same order every time something arrives. Something starts it: a message, an email, a file in a folder, or simply nine o'clock on a Monday. A few steps follow: read it, look something up in your records, write it where it belongs. A result appears: a voucher, a reply, a reminder. And a person is told, on WhatsApp or on a screen, so nothing happens in the dark.

In words

Something arrives: a message, an email, a file, or a set time of day.
The workflow reads it: the words, the numbers and the items in it.
It looks the details up in your records: the price list, the stock sheet, the customer's ledger.
It writes the result where it belongs: a voucher in Tally, a row in a sheet, a reply to the customer.
It tells a person what happened, and asks them to decide anything that needs deciding.

The important word is every. A person doing the same steps forty times a day is tired by the thirtieth. The workflow does the fortieth the same way as the first, and when something does not fit, it stops and asks rather than guessing.

What connecting your systems means

Your billing software, Tally, WhatsApp and the spreadsheets each hold one piece of the picture. Connecting them means they pass that piece to each other in the background. You type the order once. The voucher, the delivery note and the customer's confirmation are all made from that one entry.

No system is replaced. Your team keeps the screens they know. What goes is the retyping, and with it the slips that come from retyping. The list of what we connect to, and how, is on Connecting your tools.

Typed once: The order, the invoice or the enquiry is entered in one place, by the person who already does it, on the screen they already use.
Passed along in the background: The other systems receive their copy within a minute, in the shape each one expects. Nobody opens them to paste.
Checked where it matters: Anything that moves money or changes a price waits for a person to say yes. Everything else simply happens.

When a simple tool is enough

Not everything needs building. Sometimes a setting in software you already own does the job. Sometimes a ready-made connector between two well-known products does. We write our own code only when the ready-made route cannot follow your rules, and we say which it will be before we quote.

Scroll sideways to see all the columns: What we usually do and Why.

The situation, what we usually do, and why
Situation	What we usually do	Why
One repeated task inside a product you already own	Switch on the product's own feature, or set up a template	Cheapest by far, and the vendor maintains it.
Two well-known products that need to talk, with simple rules	A ready-made connector, set up and tested by us	Proven, cheap and easy to replace. Enough while the rules stay simple.
Messages in words, Tamil and English, that must be read	A workflow with a reading step and a person who approves	No ready-made connector can read a WhatsApp order.
Your own rules: credit limits, customer price lists, approvals	A custom workflow on your server	The rules are yours. No product knows them.
Anything that moves money or changes a price	Custom, with an approval step built in	A person says yes before it happens, every time.
Many systems across several departments	Custom, built one workflow at a time	Each piece proves itself before the next is started.

Ready-made means a product you subscribe to. Custom means code we write, which you own. We do not sell software, so the advice is ours.

Three workflows, up close

These are the three we are asked about most, each shown a different way. The first as a route, the second as a before and after, the third as a list of steps. The quotes are the way owners put it to us in the first call.

Orders on WhatsApp into Tally

Orders come in on WhatsApp all day. Someone reads each one and types it into Tally by evening.

A distributor in Coimbatore

The workflow reads the order as it arrives. It matches the items and quantities to your price list, matches the customer to your ledger, and prepares a draft voucher. Anything it is unsure about goes back to the customer as a question, or to your team as a note. Once a person taps approve, it posts the voucher and sends the customer a confirmation. By evening there is nothing left to type. The service that does this, with its cost, is on Build it under AI assistants for customers and staff.

In words

The order arrives on WhatsApp, in words, as a photo of a list, or as a voice note.
The workflow matches the items and quantities to your price list, and the customer to your ledger. It sends anything unclear back to the customer as a question.
It prepares a draft voucher. It posts nothing yet.
A person on your team sees the draft next to the message and approves it with one tap, or corrects it first.
The workflow posts the voucher to Tally and sends the customer a confirmation.

The invoice typed twice

Every invoice is typed twice. Once in the billing software, once again in Tally. Mistakes creep in every week.

A clinic chain in Chennai

Nothing changes for the person raising the invoice. They create it once, in the billing software they already use. Everything after that is the workflow's job, and this is how the day changes.

Before

Someone types the invoice into the billing software.
Someone types it again into Tally, by evening or the next morning.
Nobody compares the two, so a slip shows up weeks later, at GST time.
Two people hold the numbers, and neither is sure whose are right.

After

Someone types the invoice once, in the billing software.
The workflow builds the voucher, with the same items, taxes and totals, and posts it to Tally within a minute.
Once a day it compares the two sides: every invoice has a voucher, and the totals agree.
If anything does not match, it tells a person which invoice, and that person fixes it once.

On Build it this sits under automating repetitive work, with its cost and what it gives back.

Follow-ups that slip

We quote, then forget to follow up. By the time we call, they have bought from someone else.

A machinery dealer in Madurai

This one is a true sequence, so here it is as five steps. Nothing is forgotten, and the owner can see which quotations are going quiet.

A quotation goes out, by WhatsApp or email.
The workflow writes it in a register with the date and the customer.
Three days later it checks whether the customer replied.
If not, it drafts a short follow-up for the sales person to send, or sends it in your name if you prefer.
After a second quiet follow-up, it puts the quotation on a list for a phone call, and the owner sees the list.

This too sits under automating repetitive work on Build it.

When a step fails

What happens when something goes wrong halfway

The internet drops, the Tally machine is switched off, a supplier's website is down. A workflow built properly expects this. Here is the same order route as above, with the part nobody shows in the demo: what happens when Tally does not answer.

Scroll sideways to see the whole route. The list below says the same thing in words.

In words

An order arrives on WhatsApp.
The workflow reads it, prices it from your price list, and sends a voucher to Tally.
Most of the time Tally accepts it. The workflow posts the voucher and tells the customer.
If Tally is not answering, because the machine is off or the line is down, nothing is lost. The order waits.
The workflow tries again a minute later, up to three times.
If it is still failing, the workflow tells a person on WhatsApp, with the order and what went wrong.
Once fixed, the order carries on from where it stopped. Nobody types it again, and the workflow never posts it twice.

For your technical teamOrchestration, services, queues and retries, scheduling, idempotency, logging

Orchestration: n8n, self-hosted on the client's server, for the visible shape of each workflow: triggers, branching, approvals and notifications. Every workflow is exported as JSON and versioned in the client's repository.
Services: Node.js and TypeScript services for anything n8n should not carry: Tally's XML interface, WhatsApp Business webhooks, price matching, PDF generation. Python for document work: OCR, layout parsing and table extraction from scanned invoices and spreadsheets.
Queues and retries: Every external write goes through a queue with exponential backoff and a dead-letter list. A failed step retries three times over a few minutes and then pages a person. The job is never dropped.
Scheduling: Cron-style schedules for nightly reconciliation, daily follow-up runs and month-end reports, with a lock so a slow run never overlaps the next one.
Idempotency: Each inbound message, invoice or order carries a stable key. A retry or a duplicate webhook cannot post the same voucher twice.
Logging and alerting: Structured logs per workflow run: the input, each step's result, and the cost of any model call. Failures and stuck queues alert on Telegram or WhatsApp. A daily digest lists what ran and what waited for a person.
Ownership: The n8n instance, its workflows and every service run on a server in the client's name and are handed over with the code and a written guide.

The write path for a voucher, in outline. The key is what makes a retry safe.

key = hash(source, message_id)
if already_posted(key): stop
post_voucher(order)
mark_posted(key, voucher_id)
notify(person, order, voucher_id)

See what we build from these pieces

Assistants that answer, typing done for you, and answers found in your own documents. Build it shows each one with what it costs and what it gives back.

See Build it

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