The tool a teammate said saved 40 hours

This one wasn’t clever. It was just a lot of the same job.

The job

In home-service software, the pricebook is the list of everything a business sells: services, parts, prices and descriptions. Our team supports a lot of contractors, and every so often someone needs those pricebooks from many accounts at once.

By hand, that means opening each account, finding the right screens and pulling the data out, one at a time. It’s careful, slow work, and it’s easy to lose your place halfway through.

The build

I built a tool that pulls them from dozens of accounts in one run, so the data lands in one place, ready to review.

That’s about as much as I’ll say about how it works. The part worth telling came after.

What a teammate said

I didn’t time it. A teammate told me it had already saved about 40 hours of work.

That’s their number, not mine. But that’s the moment I liked: hearing that a slow job just got a lot shorter.

Why this kind of job

The task was real and repetitive, so nobody had to be convinced it was worth doing. It was the same steps every time, on every account, which is exactly the kind of work a tool handles well and people get tired of.

More like it

I think most companies have jobs like this. Plain, repetitive work that happens to be done dozens of times over. They’re not exciting. They’re the ones people keep using.