The Problem
A field services business had grown to the point where its operations couldn't keep up with it. Scheduling, accounting, job tracking, document management, and payment processing all lived in separate tools. None of them talked to each other.
The result: staff spent most of their working day copying information from one system into another. A job completed in the field had to be manually closed in the scheduling tool, entered into the accounting system, matched against the payment record, and filed in the document store. Every step was a person doing work that a connected system would do automatically.
The business wasn't inefficient because of its people. It was inefficient because its systems weren't built to work together.
What Was Built
The ten systems were connected through a central automation layer built on n8n — software that watches for events across connected systems and triggers the right action in response, without anyone having to do it manually.
When a job is completed in the field, the relevant record updates automatically in scheduling. The invoice generates in Xero (the accounting platform). The payment gets matched when it clears through FNB. The document goes to the right folder in Microsoft 365. Nothing waits for a person to move it.
The system also connects to Base44 — a custom operations application the business uses internally — so all of this runs through their existing workflows rather than replacing them.
The Outcome
The coordination work is gone. Staff who spent most of their day moving information between systems now have that time back. The business runs the same volume of work with less operational overhead, and the data across all ten systems stays accurate without anyone maintaining it manually.
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