07 · Automation & n8n
Remove the manual work between your tools.
Every business runs on a few steps that only exist in somebody’s head: export this, reformat that, paste it there, email the result. Those steps are where errors and delays live.
The problem
The spreadsheet holding it together.
The pattern is always recognisable. A person exports a report on Monday, reshapes it in a spreadsheet, uploads it somewhere else, and messages two colleagues about exceptions. It works because that person is careful and it stops working the week they are away.
Off-the-shelf automation tools handle the happy path and fall apart on the exceptions, which is most of the real volume. There is no retry, no visibility, and no record of what did not happen.
So the work quietly moves back to the human, and nobody notices until the month-end numbers are wrong.
What we build
Workflows that handle exceptions.
- Self-hosted n8n workflows, versioned and reviewable
- Integrations across Shopify, Zoho, Xero, Google Sheets and CRMs
- Webhook integrations between systems that have no native connector
- AI-assisted steps for classification, extraction and drafting
- Google Sheets reporting pipelines for teams that live in spreadsheets
Architecture
A workflow in practice.
- 01triggerA webhook, schedule or database change starts the run
- 02validateInput is checked before anything downstream is touched
- 03transformData is reshaped once, in one place, rather than in four spreadsheets
- 04assistWhere judgement is needed, a model classifies or drafts and a human approves
- 05deliverResults are written to the target system and confirmed
- 06surfaceFailures are reported with enough context to act on, not silently retried forever
Stack
- n8n
- Webhooks
- Zoho
- Xero
- Google Sheets
- Shopify Flow
- Laravel
- Ollama
Questions
Asked most often.
Why self-hosted n8n rather than a hosted tool?
Cost stops scaling with run volume, your data stays inside your infrastructure, and workflows can call internal services that are not exposed to the internet.
What happens when a workflow fails?
It reports, with context. Silent failure is the main risk in automation, so surfacing errors is part of every build rather than a later addition.
Can automation touch our finance data?
It does, commonly through Xero and Zoho. Those workflows get the tightest validation and an approval step where money moves.
Is this a one-off project or ongoing?
Both happen. Workflows tend to accumulate as teams see what is possible, so many clients keep a small ongoing engagement.
Next step