Small Business Automation: Where to Start When There's No IT Team

In a small business, nobody's job is "automation". The owner answers the email, the office manager files the paperwork, and whoever's free counts the stock. The tools that could take this off your hands often look as if they need someone technical to set them up and keep them running.

Lodol is built so you don't need that person. You set it up in your browser and Lodol runs your workflows, so there's nothing to install and no server to look after. Connecting an app is a one-time setup, with step-by-step instructions in Lodol. And every workflow reads one step at a time, in plain words, so you can see what it will do before you turn it on. Here's where we'd start.

Pick chores that are frequent, dull and easy to check

A good first chore happens every day or every week, follows the same steps each time, and goes wrong in a way you'd spot. Saving invoices into a folder is a good one. Paying them isn't, at least not yet: anything that moves money or speaks to a customer for you should start with a person approving each one. Our guide to choosing what to automate first goes further.

Five chores to hand off first

Each of these is a ready-made template in Lodol's library, built on Gmail and Google's other apps, which many small businesses run on already. Add one to your workspace, connect the apps it uses, and it runs.

1. Answer email faster, without sending anything you haven't read

Draft a reply to every new email in your voice writes the reply you'd have written to each new email and saves it as a draft in the same conversation, ready to read, change and send. Newsletters, automatic replies and mail that asks for nothing get no draft. What it won't do: invent a price, a date or a promise. Where it needs a fact it doesn't have, it leaves a blank in square brackets for you to fill, and nothing reaches the sender until you press send, unless you deliberately switch it to send on its own.

2. Clear the clutter out of your inbox

Every six hours, Clear the mail you never read out of your inbox labels and archives mail from the senders and subject words you name. What it won't do: delete anything. Archived mail stays in All Mail under its label, so one search brings it back. Subject words match whole words only, so "sale" clears "Weekend sale" but leaves "Wholesale pricing" alone, and each run moves only a small batch, so a mistyped rule can't empty your inbox before you notice.

3. File the paperwork that arrives by email

Every hour, File email attachments into Google Drive saves the attachments from the senders you choose, such as your suppliers and your accountant, into a Drive folder, each in its own file type. What it won't do: file anything twice, because each email is labeled once its attachments are saved. If one sender's files can't be saved, that's reported and the others still go through.

4. Turn order emails into rows

New this month, Extract purchase orders from Gmail reads each new order email, copies the PO number, the customer and each line's product code and quantity exactly as written, looks each code up in your product list, and adds one row per line to your orders sheet with the price and a line total. What it won't do: guess. A product code missing from your list, a missing quantity or a price that could be read two ways goes in a Needs attention column instead, and an order sent only as an attached PDF gets a row saying its lines need adding by hand.

5. Know what to reorder before you run out

Every morning at 9:00, Daily inventory monitor for low stock and expiry checks each item in your inventory sheet against its reorder level and its expiry date, and emails you a reorder list, grouped by supplier if your sheet names them, but only on mornings when something needs attention. What it won't do: pass a problem off as a quiet day. A row whose quantity or date can't be read is listed for you to check, and it writes only to its own Alert Status column, never to anything else in the row.

Stay in control without watching it

• A person decides where it matters. Add a Request approval step and the run waits for you to approve or reject, from Lodol or from the email it sends you. See asking a person before a workflow goes on.
• Every run on the record. The Runs page lists every run, including the ones a new email or a schedule started, and each one shows every step it took. If a run fails, you get an email naming the error, and once you've fixed the cause, Run again starts it from the run's own page.
• Broken sign-ins flagged. If an app's sign-in stops working, Lodol says so in a banner, with a Reconnect button that goes straight back to the app's sign-in.
• Private, and undoable. Every new workflow starts private to your workspace. On paid plans, every change is saved as a version you can roll back to.

Or describe it to your AI

If none of the templates fits, you don't need to build one step by step. Since October 1 you can connect Claude, ChatGPT or another AI tool to Lodol and ask in plain words, such as "every Friday at 4pm, email me the week's orders from my orders sheet". It builds the workflow in your workspace and lists anything you still need to fill in before it goes live. It can't connect apps or manage your members, your billing or the keys your workflows use, and those keys never pass through the chat. Your AI only works while it builds; after that, Lodol runs the workflow the same way every time.

What it costs

Lodol charges per run: one pass of a workflow, however many steps it takes. Every plan has unlimited seats, so the whole team can see what's running. For a business whose inbox gets about 25 emails a day:

That fits Builder's smallest tier, 2,500 runs for $18 a month ($15 if you pay annually). The Free plan includes 100 runs a month with no credit card, enough for the inventory check and 60 orders. If your orders come from one address, put it in the order workflow's sender filter, so the rest of your inbox doesn't start runs. The drafting and order-reading steps run on your own AI account, such as Anthropic, which bills you at its own rates; Lodol adds nothing.

Start with your inbox.
Add Draft a reply to every new email in your voice to your workspace and read tomorrow's drafts before you send them. Or browse every ready-made workflow, and start free.