Business Process Automation
Automate repetitive business processes — invoice processing, report generation, data entry, and workflow orchestration.
Identifying automation opportunities
The best automation candidates are tasks that are: done more than once a week, follow a consistent process, involve moving data between systems, and are tedious but not complex. Common examples: copying data from email attachments into spreadsheets, generating monthly reports from multiple data sources, sending follow-up emails based on specific triggers, formatting and distributing documents. Ask Claude Code: "I spend time on [describe your task]. Design an automation that handles this. Break it into steps: input (where does the data come from?), processing (what transformations happen?), output (where does the result go?), and trigger (what starts the process?)."
Invoice processing automation
Ask Claude Code: "Build an invoice processing script. It should: watch a folder for new PDF invoices, extract the key fields (vendor name, invoice number, date, amount, line items), validate the data (check for required fields, reasonable amounts), write the extracted data to a CSV file for import into our accounting system, move processed invoices to a 'processed' folder, and flag any invoices that could not be parsed for manual review." Claude Code will use PDF parsing and pattern matching to handle most standard invoice formats. The 'flag for review' step is important — automation should handle the common cases and escalate the exceptions.
Automated reporting from multiple sources
Ask Claude Code: "Build a monthly business report generator. It should: pull revenue data from our Stripe account (via API), pull user metrics from our database, pull marketing metrics from Google Analytics (via API), combine everything into a formatted HTML report with charts, calculate month-over-month changes, highlight metrics that improved or declined by more than 10 percent, and email the report to the leadership team." This consolidation report is one of the most valuable automations for any business — it replaces hours of manual data gathering with a single command.
Workflow orchestration patterns
Complex automations involve multiple steps that depend on each other. Ask Claude Code: "Build a customer onboarding workflow. When a new customer is added to the database: send a welcome email, create a project folder in our file system, generate a starter document from a template with the customer's details, notify the account manager via Slack, schedule a 30-day check-in reminder, and log all steps to an audit trail." Claude Code creates the orchestration script with error handling — if one step fails, it logs the failure and continues with the remaining steps rather than stopping entirely. This resilience is critical for business automation.
AI Automation at Work
This guide is hands-on and practical. The full curriculum covers the conceptual foundations in depth with structured lessons and quizzes.
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