ChatGPT: Ops

File subcontractor invoices into 30 job folders automatically with ChatGPT

Morgan Sterling runs Beach Cities Builder, a construction company in Hermosa Beach, California, and gets several subcontractor invoices a day across roughly 30 active job folders. Each one used to mean opening the invoice, working out the project, typing the details into Zoho Books and filing it in the right Google Drive folder. After a friend suggested it could be automated, Sterling asked ChatGPT and ended up with a script hooked up to email that puts every invoice in one folder, reads it, identifies the job and moves it to the right place. The first version took about two hours to build; Sterling says it's now effectively 100% accurate and saves roughly 5–6 hours a week. Sterling also built a script that adds any forecast with more than a 40% chance of rain in the next seven days to the calendar.

Scale catering recipes for 25–30 people up to hundreds with ChatGPT and Claude

Brian Reilly, co-owner of Arlington's Catering and Historic Venue in Springfield, took a six-week small-business AI workshop sponsored by Innovate Springfield. Reilly now uses ChatGPT and Claude to make routine checklists, such as cleaning procedures, and to scale recipes built for 25–30 people up to, say, 330. Reilly says accuracy depends on the input. When Reilly fed it information inaccurately, those mistakes were caught 'pretty quickly', and now Reilly screenshots the recipe into the tool instead to avoid user error. 'It might take a time or two, but it's been pretty accurate.'

Draft and submit a $20,000 arts grant proposal in 12 minutes with ChatGPT

Mary Catherine Brooks, board president of the Greenville Arts Council in Mississippi, learned at 4:48 PM that a $20,000 grant proposal was due by 5:00 PM. Brooks opened ChatGPT, uploaded the council's past successful proposals and had it use them to produce a new draft. The proposal was submitted before the deadline and won the $20,000, which will support arts and education programming for children and families across the Delta. '12 minutes of ChatGPT is making an impact on the lives of thousands of kids,' Brooks says.

Get a 0.75% to 12.75% unemployment insurance rate jump fixed retroactively with ChatGPT filing the missing wage report

mattmaroon runs a seasonal business and noticed their state unemployment insurance rate had jumped from 0.75% to 12.75%. Instead of hours on the state website and on hold, they asked ChatGPT what had happened. It worked out that they were being charged a penalty rate because their new payroll provider doesn't file wage reports for the one quarter with no wages, and without a report the business counted as delinquent. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report and went to the support site to request a retroactive rewrite, which was granted, saving many thousands of dollars without hitting the 5-hour usage limit.

Turn a photo of a cafe's daily inventory sheet into shopping lists for three suppliers with a custom GPT

Cole Morgan runs a small cafe with no single major supplier, so they drive to three stores. Staff fill in two paper inventory forms each day and upload them to Slack, and turning those into a checklist for each store took 2–10 minutes. An off-the-shelf OCR tool that worked well cost over $250 a month, and a Python script they had ChatGPT write wasn't accurate enough. So they built a custom GPT, 'C&K Inventory Manager', trained on a spreadsheet of every item and its vendor. Now they upload the sheet photo and get a checkbox list grouped by vendor, ready to paste into Obsidian. It asks about items missing from the sheet, such as whole milk. Accuracy improved with GPT-4o with no change to the instructions, though it sometimes asks too many questions and they have to tell it to just output the list.

Stop a runaway cloud bill and win a billing credit with ChatGPT's help

A poster says ChatGPT helped them stop a runaway Google Cloud bill, prepare the evidence and, under their supervision, talk to a real Google Cloud support agent. They report a TWD 4,043 credit, with the remaining TWD 883.50 still under appeal.