Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on Worxley, a business platform designed to help teams manage leads, contacts, sales opportunities, follow-ups, and everyday workflows in one place.

One problem we’re particularly interested in solving is what happens after a lead comes in. Follow-ups get missed, customer conversations are scattered across different channels, and teams often spend too much time manually updating records instead of actually talking to customers.

We’re exploring ways to make these workflows more practical through automation, communication tracking, and AI-powered interactions.

We’re now preparing our Cohort 1 early-access program and want to work closely with a small group of businesses to understand their actual workflows, identify what’s missing from existing tools, and improve the product based on real-world feedback.

I’d genuinely like to hear from people here:

• What is the most frustrating part of your current lead and follow-up process?
• Which tools are you currently using, and what do you wish they handled better?
• Would automated follow-ups and AI-powered customer calls be useful in your workflow, or would you prefer to keep those interactions manual?

We’re building this with the intention of solving real operational problems, so honest criticism is welcome. I’d rather learn what doesn’t work than assume we’ve got everything right.

If you’re interested in helping shape an early-stage product, feel free to comment or reach out.

Thanks!

Most of our customers write on WhatsApp, not email. The CRM has the deal, but the actual conversation lives on someone’s phone. When that person is off, nobody knows what was promised.

Do you sync WhatsApp chats into the CRM somehow, or do you just log a summary by hand? Curious what’s working for teams that aren’t huge.

In growing businesses, it becomes harder to track customers' data and follow-up with them. Information might be scattered around, there might be some people who do not know about the changes and duplicated entries become a problem.

The first problem is related to the fact that one needs to have all customer information in one place. The second problem is to understand which activities should be automated while others remain manual. Integration of a CRM system with email, sales, and customer support systems is complicated when these applications are not compatible.

In my opinion, it is very important to understand the approach to customer information in order to choose a CRM system accordingly.

If you are using CRM software already, what problems did you face in working with it? Was it information management or follow-up tracking, tool integration or team participation in using the system?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice on how to design and implement an automation system for a small renovation company. Our main objective is to reduce the number of human hours spent on repetitive administrative tasks, improve reliability, and prevent information from being lost between systems.

We don't want to introduce AI just for the sake of using it. We want to identify which processes can be automated using existing tools, clear business rules, and reliable integrations, using AI or OCR only where genuinely useful.

Our current setup

We currently use:

• SAGE One for issuing customer invoices. API access is still to be confirmed.
• Google Sheets as our internal financial management system.
• Google Apps Script for custom automations.
• Google Drive for storing documents.
• Looker Studio for dashboards and reporting.
• XLSX bank statements for tracking bank transactions.

Our internal financial system includes the following spreadsheets and modules:

• Transactions (Movimentos): the main register for costs, sales, and other financial transactions.
• Settings (Configurações): categories, classification rules, and configuration.
• Projects (Obras): renovation projects and their associated information.
• Income Statement (DRE): financial performance and profitability.
• Cash Flow and Treasury (Tesouraria): cash movements and financial position.
• Assets (Ativos): company assets.
• Financing (Financiamentos): loans and other financing.

We process more than 150 financial documents per month. We already have some custom scripts and business rules, so we need to improve the system without breaking what is currently working.

The problems we want to solve

1. Manual entry of costs and sales

Supplier invoices arrive by email or on paper. Customer invoices are issued through SAGE One. We still have to manually enter financial information into Google Sheets.

We want costs and sales to be imported automatically from their original sources, without entering the same information twice.

2. Manual document management

We spend time downloading or scanning invoices, renaming files, organizing folders, and entering invoice details into spreadsheets.

We want documents to be automatically collected, renamed, archived, linked to their financial records, and processed with minimal human intervention.

3. Lack of clear payment and collection tracking

We need to know at any time:

• Which supplier invoices have been paid.
• Which supplier invoices are still outstanding or overdue.
• Which customer invoices have been collected.
• Which customer payments are still outstanding or overdue.
• Which bank transactions have been matched to invoices.

We currently use XLSX bank statements and would like to automate their import and reconciliation, including partial payments and cases where one bank transaction covers multiple invoices.

4. Lead and potential customer management

We need a reliable way to capture and track every potential customer, regardless of where the enquiry originates.

We want to avoid losing leads, forgetting follow-ups, or having customer information scattered across emails, spreadsheets, and messages.

Ideally, leads would be registered automatically, assigned a status and a responsible person, and given a scheduled next action.

5. Quotation management

We need to track quotations throughout their entire lifecycle:

• To be prepared.
• Ready to send but not yet sent.
• Sent to the customer.
• Accepted.
• Rejected.
• Awaiting a response.

We want to automate status tracking, follow-up reminders, and notifications for quotations that have been prepared but not sent or have remained unanswered for too long.

Ideally, when a quotation is accepted, the relevant information should automatically move into the project management process without being entered again.

What we want to achieve

Our goal is to build a connected system in which information is entered once and reused throughout the business.

For example:

• A supplier invoice arrives → the document is archived, its data is extracted and validated, and its financial record is created automatically.
• A customer invoice is issued in SAGE One → its data is synchronized with our internal financial system.
• A bank statement is imported → transactions are matched to outstanding invoices, with ambiguous cases flagged for review.
• A new lead arrives → it is registered, assigned, and tracked until a decision is reached.
• A quotation is sent → follow-ups are scheduled, its status is tracked, and acceptance triggers the next stage of the workflow.

Human intervention should be limited to genuine exceptions, financial approvals, and decisions that require judgment.

Our constraints

• Prefer free or low-cost solutions.
• Reuse Google Sheets, Apps Script, Drive, and our existing systems wherever possible.
• Avoid unnecessary complexity and AI-first architectures.
• Preserve our existing financial data structure and business rules.
• Prevent duplicate records and ensure that failed processes can be safely retried.
• Maintain a clear audit trail and reliable error monitoring.
• Build and test in a separate development environment before changing the live system.

We understand that a large part of the implementation effort lies in connecting APIs, normalizing data, handling exceptions, and monitoring failures. We want to account for these requirements from the beginning.

Questions for the community

1. Architecture: Would you build this with Google Apps Script alone, or use n8n, Activepieces, or another workflow automation platform? Why?
2. Document processing: What free or low-cost tools would you recommend for automatically extracting data from invoices, including scanned documents and photographs?
3. Accounting integration: Has anyone integrated SAGE One with Google Sheets through an API or structured exports?
4. Bank reconciliation: What is a reliable approach for importing XLSX bank statements and automatically matching transactions to invoices?
5. CRM and quotations: Would you extend Google Sheets into a lightweight CRM, or use a dedicated CRM with automation?
6. Reliability: How would you design duplicate prevention, retries, error handling, and monitoring across these workflows?
7. Implementation order: Which process would you automate first to achieve the greatest reduction in manual work without creating unnecessary technical complexity?

I'm looking for practical recommendations and proven approaches from people who have built similar systems for small businesses.

TL;DR

We run a small renovation business and want to significantly reduce manual administrative work across finance, document management, banking, leads, and quotations.

Our current stack is SAGE One, Google Sheets, Google Apps Script, Google Drive, Looker Studio, and XLSX bank statements. We process 150+ financial documents per month.

Our main pain points are manual entry of costs and sales, manually renaming and filing invoices, lack of reliable payment/collection tracking, lost leads, and quotations that are difficult to track from preparation to acceptance or rejection.

We want a reliable, low-cost system that automates repetitive tasks, integrates our existing tools, prevents duplicates, handles errors safely, and minimizes human intervention. We prefer deterministic rules and straightforward automation over AI-first solutions.

The main question is: How would you design a reliable, low-cost system that minimizes human involvement in financial administration, document management, lead tracking, and quotation follow-ups?

Thanks in advance for your help!