End-to-end Automation

40h/month saved for a media company with 3M+ audience

A media channel network across 12 B2B accounts under management — Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, 3M+ audience. Operations scattered across dozens of Excel spreadsheets, all of them updated by hand.

12 B2B Accounts
Served on a retainer basis
10 Media Brands
Across 3 social networks
40+ Hours
Spent on manual ops every month

Where the 40 hours went

Every post went out through Sprout Social. Everything around the posting — what had been made, what a client was shown, what a partner was owed — lived somewhere else, and only ever moved between the three by hand.

Every post was scheduled and published here — and the trail ended here. Whether one had actually gone live was something you went and looked at.

checked post by post by hand · every week

Everything around the posting lived in spreadsheets. Four of them, updated by whoever remembered.

  • The internal report What had been made, what was overdue, what a client had put on hold, what sat with a partner for review.
  • The client report Every piece produced, the channel it went to, and a link to each one — pasted in one at a time.
  • The partner sheet What each partner channel was owed for the posts that went out through it.
  • The invoice template Re-keyed into QuickBooks by the bookkeeper, then matched to incoming payments by guesswork.
retyped into slides by hand · every month

The deck the client actually sees. The same numbers a third time, retyped into slides once a month.

Not one line ran between them. The ops director was the integration — and the 40 hours were the price of that.

The ops director was the integration

They opened the spreadsheet, then opened Sprout Social, and checked post by post whether it had actually gone live. Nothing else connected the 2 systems.

Clients had to ask

“Where is our content, when does it go live?” — every week, to someone who had to go and look. And when a post slipped, nobody found out until a client noticed.

Payments were guesswork

Invoices came off an Excel template, the bookkeeper re-keyed them into QuickBooks, and when money arrived they guessed which invoice it was for. Clients rarely leave a reference.

1 person-week a month — 5 working days of someone building reports — and that was the cost of serving 2–3 clients.

What we worked out first

Before any of it was built, 3 things decided the shape of the whole system.

The statuses were already there

We read the Sprout Social documentation and found the posts come back over the API — so “did it go live?” never needed to be a human opening a second app again.

3 kinds of user, not one

The media company (an admin and the team), the client who orders the content, and the partner whose channel it goes out through. Each gets their own view, and the handovers between them are the product.

It behaves like retail

Brands are product groups and a post in a channel is a product. Once we saw that, quantities, balances and invoices all followed from a model everyone already understands.

What we built

One system, 4 things it replaced.

  1. 1

    Proposals and credits

    Before

    Counting in a spreadsheet what a client still had coming.

    Now

    • Retainer and package templates, sent to the client as a proposal.
    • Applied to the client in a click — it becomes their balance.
    • Every piece of content draws that balance down as it’s created.
  2. 2

    Content, brief to approval

    Before

    Briefs by email, statuses in a sheet, approvals in someone’s inbox.

    Now

    • Briefs are created and sent to the partner in the system.
    • Once the partner signs off, it goes to the client to review.
    • The client approves and the status is simply approved — the team goes and posts it.
  3. 3

    Live status and reports

    Before

    The ops director cross-checking Sprout Social by hand, then rebuilding the deck in Canva.

    Now

    • Posted is posted: the status comes back through the Sprout API on its own.
    • One button turns the month into a PDF, with the metrics already in it.
    • Want to dig? Export the CSV, hand it to Claude or ChatGPT — the data is structured for it.
  4. 4

    Invoices and payment

    Before

    An Excel template, re-keyed into QuickBooks, then guessing what a payment was for.

    Now

    • The invoice is generated from the plan and created in QuickBooks with one click.
    • Clients get a page of their invoices, each with a QuickBooks payment link.
    • Who paid what is a fact in the system, not something the bookkeeper works out.

What it was actually worth

The 40 hours were the easy part to measure. The point is what those hours were holding back.

5 days
a month of reporting no longer done by hand
0
apps to open to find out if a post went live
2–3
more clients, on the team they already have

Serving 2–3 clients used to cost 1 person-week a month. That capacity is now free — so the same team can take on more business instead of maintaining spreadsheets about the business they already have.

Talk with an expert

Tell us where the manual work piles up. We’ll come back with what’s automatable and what it would take.

  • A 30-minute call to learn about your business
  • A straight answer on what AI can and can’t do for you
  • Case studies from our work, relevant to your challenge