Author: AP

Hiring is often the first answer when a growing business feels stretched. Before you add headcount, it’s worth fixing the process the new person will inherit, and seeing how much of the admin AI can take on first. That way the hire you make is worth more.

Most small businesses know they should be posting more, emailing customers more and keeping the website fresh. Nobody has the time, so the plan becomes hiring a marketing executive.

Before you advertise, separate the thinking from the producing. Deciding who you’re talking to and what you want to say is a job for people. Turning that into first drafts of blogs, posts, emails and reports is now something AI does quickly and well, with a person editing the result.

Done right, it means one person, or even a busy owner, can keep up a steady flow of marketing without it taking over the week.

What a marketing executive role usually involves

1. Writing blog posts and website content
2. Social media posts
3. Email newsletters and campaigns
4. Reporting on what’s working
5. Keeping product and service pages up to date

1. A month of content from one planning session

Give your AI assistant a few of your best past posts, who your customers are and what you want to promote this month:

“Using our past posts as a guide to tone, plan four blog posts and twelve LinkedIn posts for next month around these three themes. Then write the first blog post in full, in plain British English, with a clear call to book a call at the end.”

You edit and approve. The blank page has gone.

2. Email campaigns

Ask for a newsletter draft, three subject lines to test and a short follow-up for people who didn’t open it. Paste the result into whichever email platform you already use, check it and send.

3. One idea, used five ways

Turn each blog post into three social posts, a newsletter section and a short summary for your website. We do exactly this for our own marketing every week.

4. Reports you’ll actually read

Upload the exports from your website, email and social accounts and ask what worked, what didn’t, and what to do more of next month, in a few plain-English lines.

5. Website copy

Ask for clearer product or service descriptions, page titles and meta descriptions in the same tone. A person checks every word before it goes live.

What it saves: a typical example

Say a business wants four blog posts a month. With AI drafting, each goes from three hours to about one: 8 hours a month back.

Add twelve social posts going from 30 minutes to 10 (4 hours), two newsletters going from four hours to 90 minutes (5 hours) and a monthly report going from three hours to one (2 hours). That’s around 19 hours a month, worth about £380 a month at £20 an hour, and far more content going out. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.

Hire, automate, or both?

It depends on what you need. If the gap is producing content, AI plus a few hours of someone’s time may be enough. If the gap is strategy and ideas, hire for that, and let AI make that person far more productive.

Keep a person in charge of your brand voice, anything that makes a claim about your business, and the final approval on everything that’s published.

Want it set up for you?

We’re not IT people or a traditional agency. We’re business people who’ve put AI to work in marketing, sales and operations, and we’ll talk to you in plain business terms. We can set up your content and email routine, train your team and hand it over, or run it for you each month. See how our marketing service works: £995 + VAT to set it up, or from £695 + VAT a month for us to run it. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

Hiring is often the first answer when a growing business feels stretched. Before you add headcount, it’s worth fixing the process the new person will inherit, and seeing how much of the admin AI can take on first. That way the hire you make is worth more.

More customers means more emails. Order questions, delivery queries, returns and the odd complaint. Before long someone’s whole day is the inbox, and the answer seems to be a customer service administrator.

Before you hire, look at how many of those emails are the same twenty questions. AI is now very good at drafting replies in your tone, sorting a busy inbox and keeping a log, with a person reading every reply before it goes.

Good service is still about people. The point is that your team spends its time on the customers who need a human, not on typing the same answer for the hundredth time.

What a customer service administrator role usually involves

1. Answering customer emails and messages
2. Order and delivery queries
3. Returns, refunds and complaints
4. Keeping customer records up to date
5. Reporting on volumes and common issues

1. Replies in your tone, drafted in seconds

Give your AI assistant ten of your best past replies and your returns and delivery policies, then paste in each new email:

“Using our policies and the example replies, draft a reply to this customer. Keep our friendly tone, answer every question they asked, and tell me if anything needs a manager.”

Your team reads, tweaks and sends. A six-minute reply becomes a three-minute check.

2. Sorting the inbox first thing

Paste in the morning’s batch of emails and ask for them grouped: urgent, order queries, returns, complaints and everything else. The urgent and unhappy customers get seen first.

3. A returns and complaints log that keeps itself

Ask for one line per return or complaint: date, customer, order number, issue and next step, ready to paste into your spreadsheet. No more searching the inbox to find out what happened.

4. Turning common questions into help content

Once a month, ask which questions came up most and draft clear answers for your website’s FAQ page. Fewer customers need to email in the first place.

5. A weekly service report

Upload the log and ask for volumes, the top five issues, anything getting worse, and three plain-English suggestions to fix the cause rather than the symptom.

What it saves: a typical example

Say a business handles 25 customer emails a day at six minutes each. With AI drafting and a person checking, that drops to about three minutes: around 26 hours a month back.

Add the returns log going from 30 minutes a day to 10 (about 7 hours a month) and a weekly report going from 90 minutes to 20 (about 5 hours). That’s around 38 hours a month, worth about £760 a month at £20 an hour. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.

Hire, automate, or both?

Usually both. Let AI draft and sort, and hire people for the calls, the upset customers and the judgement on refunds. You may find your existing team can cope for longer, or that the person you hire can look after far more customers.

Keep a person reading every reply before it’s sent, and in charge of refunds, compensation and anything legal. Use a business account for your AI assistant and check its data settings before you share customer details.

Want it set up for you?

We’re not IT people. We’ve run customer-facing, sales and operations teams and put AI to work in them, and we’ll talk to you in plain business terms. We can set this up, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it each month. See our fixed-price setups, or book a free call to talk it through. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

Hiring is often the first answer when a growing business feels stretched. Before you add headcount, it’s worth fixing the process the new person will inherit, and seeing how much of the admin AI can take on first. That way the hire you make is worth more.

As a business grows, the finance admin grows with it. More supplier invoices, more statements to check, more customers to chase, and a month-end that eats into everyone’s week. The obvious answer is an accounts assistant.

Before you advertise, look at how much of the role follows the same steps every time. UK small business owners already spend around 11 hours a week on admin and finance (Amex and Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer, July 2026). Much of that is checking, matching and chasing, which AI now handles well with a person approving the result.

The aim isn’t fewer people. It’s a finance function where people spend their time on judgement and cash, not typing.

What an accounts assistant role usually involves

1. Processing supplier invoices
2. Reconciling supplier statements
3. Credit control and chasing overdue invoices
4. Expense receipts and petty cash
5. Helping with month-end reports

1. Supplier invoices

An AI assistant can read invoices from PDFs, scans and phone photos and turn them into one tidy row each, ready to import into your accounts software, with anything it’s unsure about flagged. We’ve written a full guide: How to Stop Typing Invoices by Hand.

2. Supplier statement reconciliation

Upload the supplier’s statement and the matching export from your accounts software:

“Compare this supplier statement with our ledger export. List every invoice or credit that appears on one but not the other, and any amount that doesn’t match.”

Half an hour of ticking off lines becomes a short list of differences to look into.

3. Credit control that actually happens

Late payment is a real cost: the UK Government says it costs the economy £11bn a year and closes 38 businesses a day (30 July 2025). Upload your aged debtors report and ask for a polite first reminder, a firmer second and a final notice for each overdue customer, in your own tone. A person checks and sends, and chasing stops being the job that never gets done.

4. Receipts and expenses

Photograph the receipts and ask for a spreadsheet with date, supplier, amount, VAT and category, plus anything that looks like a duplicate.

5. The month-end pack

Upload the P&L and last month’s figures and ask for a one-page, plain-English summary of what changed and why it matters. We cover this in The Monday Morning Report.

What it saves: a typical example

Take a business with 120 supplier invoices a month (about 6 hours saved, as on our invoice setup page), 10 statements a month going from 30 minutes to 10 (about 3 hours), credit control going from 3 hours a week to 1 (about 9 hours), receipts going from 2 hours to 30 minutes (1.5 hours) and the month-end pack going from 8 hours to 3 (5 hours).

That’s around 24 hours a month, worth about £480 a month at £20 an hour, before counting the cash that comes in faster. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.

Hire, automate, or both?

Often both. Automate the matching and chasing first, then hire for judgement: supplier negotiations, cash planning, keeping the books right. You may find a part-time hire is enough, or that you can hire at a more senior level.

Keep a person in charge of approving payments, anything sent to HMRC, and the final figures. Use a business account for your AI assistant and check its data settings before you share financial details.

Want it set up for you?

We’re not IT people. We’ve run finance, sales and operations teams and put AI to work in them, and we’ll talk to you in plain business terms. We can set this up, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it each month. See our fixed-price setups, including the invoice setup and the sales report setup. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

Hiring is often the first answer when a growing business feels stretched. Before you add headcount, it’s worth fixing the process the new person will inherit, and seeing how much of the admin AI can take on first. That way the hire you make is worth more.

When a small business starts winning more work, the sales admin piles up fast. Quotes to write, orders to check, the CRM to update and customers to chase. The usual answer is to hire a sales administrator.

Before you write the job advert, it’s worth asking how much of that role is the same steps every day. UK small business owners already spend around 11 hours a week on admin and finance, according to the Amex and Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer (July 2026). A lot of sales admin is exactly the kind of repeatable work AI now handles well, with a person checking the result.

This isn’t about cutting people. It’s about making sure the person you hire spends their time with customers and winning orders, not retyping notes.

What a sales administrator role usually involves

Most sales administrator adverts list something like this:

1. Preparing quotes and proposals
2. Processing orders and checking them against price lists
3. Keeping the CRM or customer spreadsheet up to date
4. Chasing quotes, orders and payments
5. Weekly sales reports for the team

Each of these has a repeatable core that an AI assistant can take on.

1. Quotes and proposals from rough notes

Give your AI assistant your price list, a couple of past quotes you’re happy with and the notes from the call:

“Using our price list and the two example quotes, write a quote for this customer from my call notes. Keep our usual layout, list each line with quantity and price, add delivery, and flag anything in my notes that isn’t on the price list.”

A 30-minute job becomes ten minutes of checking.

2. Updating the CRM after every call

Paste your rough notes in after each call and ask for the update, the next step and a date. We’ve written up the full routine in Stop Losing Track of Who You’ve Spoken To.

3. Checking orders before they go out

Upload the day’s order export and your price list:

“Compare these orders with our price list. List any line where the price, discount or product code doesn’t match, and any order missing a delivery address or PO number.”

The person processing orders only looks at the exceptions, rather than every line.

4. Chasing without the awkwardness

Ask for a list of quotes older than 14 days with no reply, then a short, friendly follow-up for each in your own tone. A person reads each one and presses send.

5. The weekly sales report

Upload the week’s sales export and ask for sales by customer and product, the biggest changes on last week, and three plain-English lines on what they mean. We cover this in detail in The Monday Morning Report.

What it saves: a typical example

Say a business sends 30 quotes a month at 30 minutes each. With AI drafting and a person checking, that drops to about 10 minutes: 10 hours a month back.

Add CRM updates going from 30 minutes a day to 10 (about 7 hours a month), chasing going from 2 hours a week to 30 minutes (about 6.5 hours) and the weekly report going from 2 hours to 20 minutes (about 7 hours). That’s around 30 hours a month, worth about £600 a month at £20 an hour. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.

Hire, automate, or both?

Usually both. Automate the repeatable core first, then hire for what AI can’t do: building relationships, handling a tricky customer, spotting the upsell. You may find you can hire later, or get far more from the person you bring in.

Keep a person in charge of prices, discounts, anything sent to a customer, and anything with your signature on it. Use a business account for your AI assistant and check its data settings before you share customer details.

Want it set up for you?

We’re not IT people. We’ve run sales, finance and operations teams and put AI to work in them, and we’ll talk to you in plain business terms. We can set this up for you, train your team, and hand it over, or keep running it each month. See our fixed-price setups, including the client tracker setup and the sales report setup. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

Hiring is often the first answer when a growing business feels stretched. Before you add headcount, it’s worth fixing the process the new person will inherit, and seeing how much of the admin AI can take on first. That way the hire you make is worth more.

Most growing online retailers hit the same point. New products need uploading, listings need tidying, prices and stock need checking every morning, and someone has to pull the trading report together for Monday. The obvious answer is another hire.

Before you write the job advert, it’s worth looking at how much of that role is repeatable admin. UK small business owners already spend around 11 hours a week on admin and finance, according to the Amex and Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer (July 2026). In e-commerce, a big slice of it follows the same steps every day, and that is exactly the work Claude is good at.

This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about making sure the person you hire, or the team you already have, spends their time growing sales rather than copying data between spreadsheets.

We use Claude in the examples below because it’s the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.

What an e-commerce trading role usually involves

Look at almost any e-commerce or trading assistant advert and you’ll see a similar list:

1. Uploading new products and writing the listings
2. Optimising titles and descriptions so they sell
3. Daily checks on stock and prices, switching products on and off
4. Checking new product photos
5. Weekly trading reports for the commercial team
6. Lots of spreadsheet work and lookups

Every one of those has a repeatable core that Claude can take on, with a person checking the result.

1. New product uploads and listing copy

Give Claude the supplier’s spec sheet and your house style, and ask for listings in the exact columns your website or marketplace import needs:

“Here are the spec sheets for 20 new products and three of our best-selling listings as examples. For each product, write a title under 150 characters, five bullet points and a 120-word description in the same style. Put it all in an Excel file with the columns SKU, Title, Bullet 1 to 5 and Description.”

You check the file, fix anything that’s off, and import it. Claude can create Excel files on any Claude plan.

2. Daily stock and price checks

Each morning, upload yesterday’s stock and price export and ask for the exceptions only:

“List every product that is live but out of stock, every product that is back in stock but switched off, and any price below cost or more than 20% different from last week. Give me a spreadsheet I can work through, in that order.”

A 45-minute scroll through thousands of rows becomes a ten-minute list of the products that actually need action.

3. Checking product photos

Claude can look at the photos you upload (JPEG, PNG and similar files work on every plan) and check them against your rules:

“Check these 30 product photos. Flag any that don’t have a plain white background, look blurry, or show a colour that doesn’t match the product name in the file name.”

A person still makes the final call, but they only need to look at the ones Claude flags.

4. Weekly trading reports

Upload the weekly sales exports from each channel and ask for the report you build by hand today: sales by channel, best and worst sellers, margin, and a few plain-English lines on what changed. No more rebuilding the same lookups every Monday. If you’re on a paid Claude plan (Pro and above), Claude for Excel can also build and fix lookups inside your own workbook. We’ve written about this in detail in The Monday Morning Report.

What it saves: a typical example

Say a small online retailer adds 60 new products a month and each listing takes 20 minutes to write by hand. With Claude drafting and a person checking, that drops to about 5 minutes. That’s 15 hours a month back.

Add daily stock and price checks going from 45 minutes to 10 minutes (about 12 hours a month) and a weekly report going from 2 hours to 20 minutes (about 7 hours a month). That’s around 34 hours a month, worth about £680 a month at £20 an hour. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.

Hire, automate, or both?

For most growing retailers, the answer is both. Automate the repeatable core first, then hire for judgement: supplier relationships, range planning, campaign ideas and growing the channels. You may find you can hire later, hire at a more senior level, or get far more from the person you do bring in.

Keep a person in charge of anything that touches customers or money: price changes, what goes live, and the final check on every listing.

Want it set up for you?

We set up jobs like these for a fixed price, done in weeks, built around your own channels and spreadsheets. See our fixed-price setups, including the fixed-price sales report setup. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

The hardest thing for the MD of a growing business is getting their week back. This is how one MD used AI to take the routine thinking and admin off his desk.

I built an AI leadership team in Claude this week: six named agents, each with one job, sitting alongside the real people who run the business with me.

I built this in Claude, the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.

How an AI Leadership Team Works

Every MD has a pile of jobs that never quite reach the top. Mine were the inbox, the pipeline, the website and the numbers I meant to check on Friday.

So I gave each pile an owner. Each agent is a Claude skill, which is a folder of written instructions Claude loads when the job comes up. Anthropic’s guide to what Claude skills are explains the mechanics. There’s no coding. The work is putting your standards on paper.

Here’s the team:

Agent	Role	What it does for me
Bob	Chief of Staff	Takes every new task, scores it and hands it to the right owner
Quinny	Finance Director	Margin, cash, costs and what drives the value of the business
Wolf	Sales Director	Reads the pipeline and activity sheets, finds leads, keeps the CRM
Megan	PA	Turns Outlook, Teams, Slack and my calendar into one list for the day
Kyle	Marketing Manager	Sweeps the website for broken links and conversion leaks
Claire	Wellbeing	Checks the tone of a message before I send it

Yes, they have names. It sounds daft until you try it. “Ask Wolf” is quicker to say than “analyse the sales pipeline against target”, and the team remembers who does what.

If you’d like help putting your own leadership jobs on paper, that’s exactly what we work through in a 30-minute call. Most owners have three of these agents’ worth of work sitting in their inbox already.

Start With a Chief of Staff, Not a Specialist

The most useful agent isn’t the clever one. It’s the one that decides what to do first.

Bob scores each incoming job from 1 to 5 on four things:

Money: the pound impact on sales, margin or cost
Urgency: a real deadline, or someone waiting
Only me: does it need the MD, or could someone else do it?
Effort: quick jobs score higher

A total of 15 or more means now. 11 to 14 means this week. 6 or under gets parked, and Bob says so plainly. Parking is a decision, not a failure.

That scoring is the bit I’d copy first. It works on a sticky note, never mind in an AI leadership team. It grew out of the day-to-day jobs I wrote about in what I actually use AI for.

Give Every Agent One Job and Hard Rules

Vague agents give vague answers. Each skill file says what the agent does, which files it reads, what the output looks like and what it must never do.

The rules matter more than the instructions. Mine are short:

Nothing gets sent, deleted, bought or changed without my yes
Rep comparisons and coaching notes are for my eyes only
Every number traces back to a file and a cell
Estimates are marked as estimates

If you’re handing an AI tool access to your inbox and files, the ICO’s guidance on AI and data protection is worth an hour of your time. Write your rules before you connect anything. If you want a second pair of eyes on them, that’s what advisory is for.

Put Your AI Agents on a Schedule

An agent you have to remember to ask is just another job on the list.

So four of mine run on their own. Megan sends a daily brief. Wolf does a Monday pipeline review. Kyle runs a site sweep. Claire does a Friday check-in on my week. Claude’s scheduled tasks run even when my laptop is shut, which is most of Sunday.

This is where AI agents for small business stop being a toy. The Monday review lands before the sales meeting, not after it.

What Didn’t Work First Time

I’d love to tell you it all clicked. It didn’t.

Megan couldn’t see Microsoft To Do through the connector, so flagged emails became her task list instead. Wolf couldn’t read two of the sales team’s diaries until each person shared them at the “Can view all details” level. I’d assumed that being able to see them in Outlook was enough. It wasn’t.

I also missed an obvious hire. I built five agents, looked at the list and realised there was no Sales Director. A glaring omission for a business with a field sales team. Wolf was added soon after.

And none of it replaces judgement. Quinny can tell you margin has slipped. It won’t tell you whether to have the difficult conversation with a supplier. That’s still your job.

Andrew’s Final Thoughts

An AI leadership team won’t run your business. It will stop the important-but-not-urgent jobs falling off the end of every week. Start with one chief of staff and a scoring rule. Add specialists only when you can write down exactly what good looks like. If you’d rather not start from a blank page, our workshops build the first two agents with you.

AI Leadership Team FAQs

What is an AI leadership team?

An AI leadership team is a set of AI agents, each set up to do one leadership job, such as finance, sales or diary management. In Claude, each one is set up as a skill: written instructions, the sources it reads and the rules it must follow. They support the people running the business. They don’t replace them.

Do I need to code to build AI agents?

No. Skills are written in plain English: what the job is, where the information lives, what the result should look like and what’s off limits. The hard part is being clear about the standard you expect. Few owners have ever written that down.

Is it safe to connect AI agents to email and company files?

It can be, if you set the rules first. Give agents read access where you can, and require your approval before anything is sent, deleted or bought. Keep sensitive comparisons private, and check your data protection position before connecting customer data.

How long does it take to build an AI leadership team?

A first working version of each agent takes an hour or two once you know what you want. The time goes on fixing access, such as calendar sharing and file locations, and on tightening instructions after the first few runs. Begin with a single agent and add the next once it earns its place.

Which AI agent should a small business build first?

Build the triage agent first: one that sorts and prioritises incoming work. It saves time on day one and makes every other agent more useful, because it decides what each of them should pick up. Next, build whichever job you most often put off. For many MDs, that’s the weekly sales report.

We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

The business runs on spreadsheets, and nobody’s sure which version is right. Customer contacts are usually the first place that bites. Here’s a simple way to get one trusted list, set up with AI.

If your business runs on conversations, the calls are rarely the hard part. The hard part is remembering who you spoke to, what you promised them, and who is still waiting to hear back.

Most small firms keep all of this in three places: an inbox, a spreadsheet that nobody quite trusts, and someone’s head. It works fine until a busy week. Then a promised call-back slips, a good client goes quiet, and someone else gets the work.

UK small business owners already spend around 11 hours a week on admin and finance, according to the Amex and Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer (July 2026). Keeping track of people is a big slice of that. Here is how to build a simple client tracker with Claude in an afternoon, and how to let Claude do most of the note-taking and chasing.

We use Claude in the examples below because it’s the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.

What a client tracker actually needs to do

Strip it back and a tracker only has five jobs:

1. Who they are and how to reach them
2. Where things stand (new, talking, waiting on a decision, won, lost)
3. What was said last time
4. What happens next, and when
5. Who has gone quiet

That’s it. You don’t need a system with 200 settings to do those five things well. You need one tidy spreadsheet and a few good habits, and Claude can help with both.

Step 1: Ask Claude to build the spreadsheet

Claude can create Excel files for you on any plan. Open a new chat and ask for exactly what you want. For example:

“Build me an Excel client tracker. One tab for contacts (name, company, email, phone, how we met). One tab for opportunities, with a stage column using a dropdown: New, Talking, Waiting on decision, Won, Lost. One tab for a dated activity log. And a Follow-ups due tab that lists anyone whose next action date is today or earlier. Highlight overdue follow-ups in red.”

Download the file and save it somewhere your team already shares, such as your business OneDrive. Open it, click around, and ask Claude to change anything that doesn’t fit the way you work.

Step 2: Bring in the contacts you already have

You probably have contacts scattered across old spreadsheets and exports. Give Claude the file and ask it to tidy them up:

“Here’s my current contacts list. Remove duplicates, split full names into first and last name, and put everything in the same columns as the Contacts tab of my tracker.”

Check the result before you paste it in. Claude is quick at tidying, but you know which contacts matter. This is also a good moment to delete anyone you no longer have a reason to keep.

Step 3: Turn call notes into tracker updates

This is where the time comes back. Set up a Claude Project called “Client tracker” (Projects are on every plan) and give it instructions like these:

“After each call I’ll paste my rough notes. Give me: one line for the activity log with today’s date, the stage this opportunity should now be at, the next action and a sensible date for it, and a short, friendly follow-up email in plain British English that I can send straight away.”

Example: you paste in “Spoke to Sarah at a logistics firm. Keen, wants a price for the bigger option, budget signed off end of month, call back Thursday.” Claude gives you the log line, moves the stage to Waiting on decision, sets the next action to call back Thursday, and drafts a two-line email confirming what you agreed. You check it, paste the line into the tracker and send the email. Two minutes, done.

Step 4: A Monday “who to chase” list

Once a week, give Claude your tracker and ask:

“Who is overdue? Who hasn’t heard from us in 14 days or more? Which three conversations are most worth my time this week, and why?”

If you’re on a paid Claude plan (Pro and above), Claude for Excel lets you ask the same questions inside the workbook itself, and update rows by asking in plain English. It’s the same idea as the weekly reports in The Monday Morning Report.

What it saves: a typical example

Say each person who deals with clients spends about 15 minutes a day hunting through emails and notes for who to chase, and writing follow-ups from scratch. With the tracker and the Project, that drops to about 5 minutes.

That’s 50 minutes a week per person. For a team of three, it’s 2.5 hours a week, worth around £50 a week, or £2,600 a year, at £20 an hour. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.

The bigger win doesn’t show up in that sum: the follow-ups that stop slipping, and the clients who hear back from you before they hear from someone else.

Keep it safe

A client tracker holds personal details, so a few simple rules:

1. Only record what you need to do the work
2. Keep the file in your own business storage, open only to the people who need it
3. Keep sensitive details out of your notes. If you wouldn’t put it in a business email, don’t put it in the tracker
4. Delete contacts you no longer have a reason to keep
5. Check your Claude account’s data settings before you start

When this is enough, and when it isn’t

A spreadsheet tracker with Claude alongside it works well for teams of roughly 1 to 15 people who already live in email and Excel. If you need every email logged automatically, or lots of people editing the same records all day, a dedicated system may suit you better. We’ll always tell you honestly which camp you’re in.

Want it set up for you?

If you’d rather not build it yourself, our fixed-price client tracker setup does it for you in three weeks, for £995 + VAT. We build the tracker around how you already work, bring your contacts in, set up Claude to do the note-taking and chasing, and show your team how to use it. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.

Want to see the same idea at a bigger scale? Read Build a CRM With AI: What I Learned Doing It for a Sales Team.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

If you’re still building the reports rather than reading them, the business has outgrown its spreadsheets. AI can now pull the Monday numbers together for you, so the time goes on deciding, not collating.

Every business has one. The report that swallows somebody’s Monday morning.

Download the sales figures. Paste them into the spreadsheet. Fix the columns that have mysteriously moved. Rebuild the same chart as last week. Write three lines about what it all means. Email it round. Do it all again next Monday.

Reporting matters, no argument there. The problem is that most of the time goes on gathering and tidying the numbers, and hardly any on understanding them. Claude can do the tidying and give you a first draft of the understanding.

We use Claude in the examples below because it’s the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.

Every report is really three jobs

The first job is gathering the numbers from your till, accounts package or online shop. The second is formatting them into the same layout every time. The third is explaining what changed and what you’re going to do about it.

Almost every business system can export a spreadsheet, so the gathering is usually a couple of clicks. Claude handles the formatting completely, and gives you a strong first draft of the explaining.

Step 1: Show Claude what a good report looks like

Create a Project in Claude called “Weekly sales report”. In the instructions, describe the report you want: this week against last week, this month against the same month last year, top five customers, top five products, and a short summary at the top.

If you already have a report you like, upload an old copy to the Project and tell Claude to follow the same layout every time.

Step 2: Drop in the numbers each week

Each Monday, export the week’s figures and drop the file into a chat in the Project. Then ask:

“Build this week’s sales report as an Excel file in our usual layout, with a chart of the last eight weeks. Then give me five plain-English bullet points on what changed, anything unusual, and one question I should be asking the team.”

Claude creates the spreadsheet for you to download, and the summary is ready to paste into an email. Read it, fix anything it’s got wrong, and add the context it can’t know (“sales dipped because our biggest customer is on holiday”).

If you already live in Excel, the Claude for Excel add-in (on Claude’s paid plans) does the same thing inside your own workbook.

Month-end works the same way

Upload your P&L and ask Claude to write a one-page, plain-English summary for your managers or shareholders, or turn it into a short Word report or slide deck. We’ve written about why a fixed annual budget goes stale so quickly in Why We Stopped Trusting the Annual Budget, and Claude is how we keep the rolling version up to date.

What it saves

Here’s a typical example. A weekly sales report that takes 2 hours, 48 weeks a year, is 96 hours a year. Cut that to 20 minutes of checking and you get back 80 hours. That’s two full working weeks.

A few honest warnings

Always check any number Claude quotes back at you against the source. It’s very good at explaining, but it can still misread a figure. Keep the raw data, because the summary is a guide, not the record. And give the report an owner, so someone is always looking at it with a critical eye.

Your starter checklist

1. List every regular report in the business and who builds it.
2. Note how long each one takes.
3. Pick the most painful one.
4. Create a Claude Project for it and upload an example you like.
5. Run it through Claude for four weeks alongside the old way, then switch.

Rather we set it up for you?

We can set the whole thing up for you in two weeks with our fixed-price sales report setup. At £595 + VAT, it pays for itself in just over 2 months for a 4-hour weekly report. We also cover reporting in our Finance deep dive workshop. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →

In most growing businesses the admin grew faster than the team. Supplier invoices are a classic example: hours of typing that nobody planned for. Here’s how AI takes that job off the pile.

If you run a small business, you’ll know the routine. Supplier invoices turn up by email, as PDFs, as blurry photos of receipts, and occasionally on actual paper. Someone (usually you, usually at 9pm) opens each one, types the supplier, date, amount and VAT into the accounts software, files it, and moves on to the next.

None of it is difficult. It’s just slow, dull and very easy to get wrong. It’s also one of the easiest jobs to hand to Claude, and you don’t need any other software or any technical skills to do it.

We use Claude in the examples below because it’s the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.

What it’s actually costing you

Here’s a typical example. 120 supplier invoices a month, at 4 minutes each, is 8 hours a month. That’s a whole working day, every month, copying numbers from one screen to another.

And that’s before the mistakes. A mistyped VAT figure. A bill paid twice. The invoice that sat in someone’s inbox until the supplier rang up asking where their money was.

Step 1: Give Claude the rules once

Start by creating a Project in Claude and calling it something like “Supplier invoices”. A Project is a workspace where Claude remembers your instructions, so you only explain things once.

In the Project instructions, tell Claude how your business works: your main suppliers, which cost category each one goes under, how you treat VAT, and the columns your accounts software expects when you import bills. Most accounts packages let you import bills from a spreadsheet, so ask Claude to match that layout.

Step 2: Drop the invoices in and let Claude do the reading

Once a week, drag that week’s invoices into a chat in the Project. PDFs, scans and phone photos all work. Then ask:

“Read these invoices and create a spreadsheet with one row per invoice: supplier, invoice number, date, net, VAT, total and cost category. Flag anything you’re not sure about.”

Claude reads each one and gives you a spreadsheet you can download and import. Your job changes from typing to checking. Most rows take seconds to check instead of minutes to enter.

If checking takes 1 minute instead of 4, those 8 hours become 2 hours a month. That’s 6 hours back, or roughly 72 hours a year.

Step 3: Let Claude be your second pair of eyes

Because Claude has the whole batch in front of it, it can spot things a tired person misses at 9pm. Try asking:

“Check this batch for duplicates, any invoice more than 20% higher than last month from the same supplier, maths that doesn’t add up, and missing VAT numbers.”

And when something is wrong, ask Claude to draft a polite but firm email to the supplier in your tone of voice. You read it, tweak it and send it.

Keeping it safe

Use a Claude business plan, or check your privacy settings, so you’re comfortable with how your data is handled. Keep a person approving every payment: Claude prepares the work, people make the decisions. And keep your records tidy and digital. If you’re VAT registered, Making Tax Digital already expects that of you.

Your checklist for this week

1. Count how many supplier invoices you handle in a month.
2. Time how long one takes to enter (be honest).
3. Create a “Supplier invoices” Project in Claude and add your instructions.
4. Run last week’s invoices through it and compare the spreadsheet with what you typed by hand.
5. Decide who checks and approves, and book a weekly slot to do it.

Want a hand setting it up?

This is exactly the sort of workflow we set up and train teams on. It’s a big part of our Finance deep dive workshop, and we can set the whole thing up for you in two weeks with our fixed-price invoice setup. At £595 + VAT, a business handling 250 invoices a month can expect it to pay for itself in under 3 months.

Not sure where to start? Take our 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.

We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.

Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.

See how the workshops work →

Or book a free 30-minute call with us →