My friend Sara runs a virtual assistant company working with mortgage brokers. She and her team of contractors generate thousands of timesheet entries for hundreds of brokers each month.

At month end, she would manually review timesheets from all her contractors, combine them in Excel and hand-build build invoices in QuickBooks Online. This took up about four business days each month.

Tedious. And gross.

We spec’ed out a system that would automate the process. We would have

  • A nice data entry interface for contractors to log their work throughout the day.
  • A review interface for Sara to review and approve the entries as they came in.
  • A review interface for contractors so they can see their billable hours.
  • Customers and Products automatically synced from QuickBooks to the app.
  • Invoice drafts generated in real time throughout the month for each broker.

Timesheet summary view Timesheet summary view

Technically, this was a simple little Rails app. I got to write some nice Postgres views, explore Turbo/Stimulus a little more and try out Rails’ new solid_queue for background jobs.

But business-wise, this project was a huge success. We freed up a lot of time for Sara that she immediately put to use landing a huge new client that she had been turning away.

Invoice view Invoice view

Here’s the amazing email she sent me after the project was delivered:

I quite possibly think you are the most genius person on the planet. This is so unreal. Do you understand how drastically you changed things for me?!

That felt pretty great.