“I need your help.”

Years before I started BluCat, I worked for a nonprofit. Part of my job was entering the previous day’s sales into QuickBooks Online. Every charge came through Stripe. Every one had to be found, matched to a customer, coded to the right program, entered, and the processing fee recorded separately. Every morning, before anything else. Two hours, every day.

So I built something. A course database mapped each course number to the right QuickBooks product and class, and Zapier did the rest — found or created the customer, recorded the sale against the correct program, and booked the Stripe fee as its own expense.

Two hours every morning became none. And the program reports got better than they’d ever been, because a machine codes consistently and a person at 7am doesn’t.

I wasn’t a consultant. I was the guy doing the data entry, and I got tired of it.

The best automations don’t come from someone who knows the software. They come from someone who has actually done the task and knows exactly which part of it is stupid.

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The phone rang with a name I hadn’t seen in years.

We’d worked together at another company a long time ago, and we hadn’t stayed in touch — the kind of contact you assume you’ll never hear from again. I looked at the screen and thought about letting it go to voicemail.

I answered.

It was a school in Florida. Their books were, in fact, in bad shape — and I wasn’t the first person they’d asked. They’d already brought in other people to clean it up, and it hadn’t gotten done.

That’s more common than you’d think. Cleanup work looks like data entry from the outside, so organizations hire for data entry, and then the project stalls partway through because nobody can figure out how the file got that way in the first place.

We fixed it. Not just the numbers — the processes underneath, so it wouldn’t drift back. Then I trained their new bookkeeper to run it.

That was three years ago. I still consult with them on the complicated things.

That call is the shortest version of what this business actually is. Somebody is in trouble with their books, they’ve usually tried something already, and they need someone who will see it all the way through instead of leaving halfway.

I’m glad I picked up.

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