20+ Hours of Weekly Admin Eliminated by Replacing 5 Systems and an Excel Library

The Situation

A custom timber coating manufacturer was operating a sophisticated business across two distinct production lines: contract coating on customer-supplied or in-house timber, and custom stairnosing manufacturing. Each line had its own logic, formulas, and process dependencies. The business had built genuinely impressive operational intelligence over years, but that intelligence was scattered across five disconnected platforms: Workflow Max for job tracking, Float for staff scheduling, Xero for invoicing, OneDrive for documents, and a library of Excel spreadsheets holding the technical knowledge that made the business work.

The Excel layer was where the real complexity lived: a master colour database with internal codes for every bespoke formulation, mixing formulas down to the millilitre, job task hour calculators, product consumption calculators, pricing matrices with multiple tiers and customer-specific overrides, and a cash flow forecast tracking material orders with staggered payment milestones.

The owner was running 20 plus hours per week on administration alone, chasing job status across systems, entering data into three platforms for every job, working out product mixes from Excel and printing them for the workshop. Two business partners ran the company with three production staff, and the system depended entirely on the owner's head holding everything together.

Two hard requirements sat behind the project. The business needed to operate without the owner doing all the administration. And nothing could be lost in the transition: every formula, every internal code, every customer-specific arrangement had to survive intact.

Our Approach

We started with a 90 minute discovery and then went deep. Over the project we worked through thirty plus documents the owner shared: spreadsheets, video walkthroughs of the existing workflow, internal SOPs, boards mapping inventory logic. We built our own process diagrams and iterated them with the owner until every step matched how the business actually ran.

The architectural decision that shaped everything was treating the system as a set of connected modules rather than one monolithic build. The sales side, the production side, and the finance side each became their own area with their own logic, while sharing the underlying data that ties them together. We mapped and rebuilt the full operational scope: lead and customer management, deal pipeline, job intake and processing, production task generation and scheduling, the technical colour and formulation library, inventory and goods movement, invoicing and accounting integration, and role-based dashboards. Each part lives where it belongs, but the connections between them mean the owner enters information once and it flows everywhere it needs to go.

We rebuilt the Excel calculation logic inside the system. The task hour calculators became automations: enter the job parameters, choose the process, and the system generates the production tasks with calculated hours, scheduled across the right days based on drying time dependencies. The mixing formulas became live calculators inside each task, so when production staff need to mix a colour, they see the exact quantities required for the volume they need.

Paper job briefs became digital records accessible on tablets in the workshop, so production staff can capture machine settings, hours, photos, and task completion directly at the source. Role-based dashboards give each user the view they need: a high-level operational view for the owners, and focused production views for each side of the business. And the Xero integration removes the manual handoff between operations and bookkeeping: invoices are generated automatically based on the customer's payment terms and flow through to the accountant without anyone duplicating data.

Before

• Operations split across Workflow Max, Float, Xero, OneDrive, and a library of Excel spreadsheets, with the same data manually entered in multiple places

• Technical knowledge living in standalone Excel files used as calculators with no historical record

• Job briefs printed on paper, filled in by hand, and uploaded back to the system, with information regularly lost or transcribed incorrectly

• Inwards goods on paper forms often arriving without job numbers, leaving the owner to physically search the warehouse to join the dots

• Customer-specific pricing held in the owner's memory rather than enforced by any system

• Owner spending 20 plus hours per week on administration, with the business unable to run without them

After

• A unified system in SmartSuite replacing the previous toolchain end to end

• All technical knowledge rebuilt as live system logic, with full historical record on every job

• Digital job briefs on workshop tablets, with machine settings, hours, photos, and task completion captured directly at the source

• Goods movement tracked as structured records with delivery status, photo verification, and automatic linking to jobs or inventory

• Automated task generation, scheduling, and pricing applied correctly per customer on every quote and invoice

• Xero integration generating invoices according to customer payment terms, with cost data flowing automatically

• Role-specific dashboards giving each user only the view they need

• Comprehensive documentation: six training videos and two SOP manuals covering every part of the system

The Outcome

The system replaces the entire previous toolchain. The owner's administrative workload, previously the bottleneck preventing the business from running without them, is now absorbed into automated workflows. Production staff work directly in the system on tablets rather than against it on paper. The colour library, mixing formulas, pricing matrices, and consumption calculations, previously fragile knowledge held in Excel files, are now structured system data with full traceability. The Xero integration removes the manual handoff between operations and bookkeeping. Both business partners and the bookkeeper have access designed for how each of them actually works, and the system grows with the business rather than being something the business has to work around.