Applications, and what they cover
Install one from the catalogue, or describe the one you need. Either way it arrives working. The list below is a sample; yours will look different.
Work itself, not reports about it. Boards with columns you define, cards with an owner, a deadline and a checklist, dragged along as the work moves. Requests arrive from a form, an email or a messenger and land in somebody's queue. Recurring work comes back on schedule, and meeting actions stay on the board. Most companies run this layer in a chat and a spreadsheet.
Projects, above that layer. Which projects are running, who is on them, what they cost, what is late and what is blocked. The portfolio view reads the same tasks people work in, so it stays true between Friday summaries.
Sales and customers. A CRM with the pipeline and the activity. Quotes, with the discount approval attached. Contracts and their renewal dates. Customer claims and complaints, with an owner and a clock.
Buying and suppliers. Purchase requests and their approvals. Supplier vetting before the first invoice. Comparing bids. Matching an invoice against what was ordered and what arrived.
People. Onboarding, and the offboarding everybody forgets until security asks. Absence and holidays. Recruitment. Reviews and one-to-ones. Training and certifications, with expiry dates somebody watches. Expense claims. A portal where all of that lives for the person it belongs to.
Operations, whatever yours are. An equipment register with a maintenance schedule. Stock with batches and shelf life. Quality incidents and the corrective actions that follow. Field requests. Facilities and office issues. A fleet. Shipments.
Compliance and risk. Registers where "approximately complete" is a finding. Internal audits and what they turn up. Policy sign-off, with a record of who acknowledged what. A risk register with a review date on it.
Money, without touching your accounting. Budgets and what is committed against them. Price lists and their approvals. Loyalty or bonus points. A view of what a counterparty owes. The ledger under all of it is real double entry. See Ledger.
Marketing. Campaigns from idea to plan. A content calendar. Events, and everything that has to happen before one.
And the registers nobody ever built a system for. You have four or five: the contracts folder, the equipment list, the exceptions log, the spreadsheet on one person's laptop. None of them was ever worth a project. Each of them takes an afternoon here.
See Solutions for what is ready to install, and Applications for how one is made.
Your data, from wherever it is
You do not have to move your accounting to get reporting on it.
- Pull your finances in from QuickBooks, your ERP, your warehouse system, as a live connection or refreshed on a schedule
- Databases and services - PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL, ClickHouse, anything with an API
- The spreadsheets people actually maintain - uploaded, or collected automatically from a folder, a share or a Google Sheet
- And joined together, so revenue from one system sits beside costs from another and requests from a third
Then build the dashboards over it and share a link, not a screenshot. See Analytics.
The work that has always lived in spreadsheets
Planning, budgets, forecasts, the list somebody maintains by hand. Keep the grid and the formulas people already know. What they type there is data the rest of the system can use: a plan can start an approval, and two people can be in the sheet at once. See Spreadsheets.
And the AI employees do the routine
- They watch. The deal that has not moved in eleven days. The stock that runs out before the next delivery. The request nobody picked up on Friday. The invoice that does not match the order.
- They check. Look the company up, fill in what can be filled in, verify a record against another system, flag the field that contradicts itself.
- They remind. The approval sitting with somebody on holiday, the document nobody attached, the deadline on Thursday - in Slack, Telegram or email, where the person actually is.
- They prepare. The summary, the draft reply, the figures for the decision, so the decision takes two minutes.
- They signal. Anything outside what they may handle goes to a person, with what they found.
They work inside your applications, under the same permissions as everyone else, and everything they do is in the same history. See AI organisation.
Where to start
Pick one process that annoys everybody: the approval that goes missing, the report somebody rebuilds every month, the register kept in a file. Install the closest ready application or describe what you need, run it with real work for a fortnight, and change what turns out to be wrong. See Getting started.