Switched Off on Purpose

Last week I wrote about a client whose crews had a rule nobody ever wrote down: blue text on the schedule meant a job was postponed for weather. Quick update on that one. Configurable text color went live this week, along with green badges for installs and red badges for removals. We also pinned the date headers to the top of the schedule so they stay visible while you scroll. None of these are big features, but the team noticed right away, and one of them agreed the old scrolling had been rough.

That's a pretty good summary of the week, honestly. Lots of practical improvements, a couple of bigger pieces moving forward, and one podcast recording I really enjoyed. Here's what I've been up to.

Operations apps

Most of my week went to that same field services client. Their custom operations app has been live for a few weeks now, and we've moved from launch mode into tuning mode, where most of the work comes straight from watching the team use it.

A few things we shipped:

• A master search bar. Finding a contract used to mean searching three separate tabs. Now it's one search across all of them, and the team told us on our weekly call that it's been very helpful.
• Signature notifications. The app now emails the right people when a contract is sent for signature and again when it's signed. You can also copy extra people on a single send, and the field suggests names as you type.
• Multi-month billing. A longer rental used to mean renewing every 28 days. Now an estimate can cover anywhere from 3 to 26 billing cycles up front, and invoices and expiration dates scale with it.
• Day-by-day edits for multi-day jobs. If one day of a longer job changes, like a holiday, you can edit just that day without touching the rest.
• Clearer credit balances. If a customer has overpaid, their balance now says so, instead of showing a number that could be read either way.

We also recorded a few short how-to videos, including a three-minute walkthrough on updating the job site address on a contract. The next morning, someone wrote back that they now knew how to fix it themselves. I'm a big believer in short videos for this. A three-minute walkthrough beats a page of instructions almost every time.

The piece I'm most excited about is the new reports page. One report pulls every contract with exactly one open issue, because those are the fastest to clear and get back to green. Another tracks the average number of days items have been past due, broken out by type.

Honest note here: the number of contracts with zero open issues dipped this week, from 41 to 38, partly because more contracts came into the system. That's not a bad sign. That's the report doing its job. Before, nobody could see that number at all. Now the team can look at it every week and decide where to spend their time. A couple of the overdue averages are already trending down, which tells us the team is catching things faster.

Event tech

We're a few weeks into building a planning platform for an event production company that runs multi-day corporate events. Think schedules, rooms, food and beverage, vendors, budgets and client portals, all in one place.

My first move this week was to simplify. The early mockup tried to do a lot at once, and I've learned it's usually better to start lean and add things as you learn how the client actually works. It can look like a slower start, but it means every feature we add later fits their process instead of fighting it.

The big addition this week was a food and beverage section. Each meal can be tied to a session on the schedule or set on its own, with a meal type, cost, vendor and headcount. For an event planner, meals touch almost everything, so getting that structure right early matters.

The client also started testing the platform and sent over a detailed list of notes. That's my favorite kind of email to get. I went through every item and replied the next morning, with only one follow-up question. They also shared their task lists, which we'll turn into checklist templates they can duplicate for each new event, plus examples of the proposals and contracts they send, so we can look at connecting the platform to the software they already use for those.

AI and automation

Back on the operations app, we're finishing up automatic past-due payment reminders. Once an invoice is past due, the system will send a statement and a secure payment link every two weeks, pulling everything straight from the accounting system.

Here's the part I want to highlight: it ships switched off for every contract. Someone on the team has to turn it on, contract by contract.

That's a rule I follow for anything that emails your customers. Internal notifications can default to on. But external emails carry your name, and a reminder sent to the wrong person, or to a customer who already has an arrangement with you, costs more goodwill than the automation saves. So start off, test with a few accounts, then widen it.

Try this: If you're automating anything customer-facing this quarter, write down who should get it, who definitely shouldn't, and who decides when it turns on. If you can't answer the last one, it's not ready.

Note to self, and maybe useful to you: I write every build request in a plain document first, with screenshots, before an AI coding tool touches it. What screen, what should change, what should stay the same, and the edge cases I'm worried about. It takes ten extra minutes and saves hours of back and forth. AI builders are fast, but they're only as good as the instructions you give them.

Podcast

We recorded a new episode of Events on Autopilot this week with the founder of a festival consultancy. It was a great conversation, and I'll share the episode once it's live. If you run events and haven't checked out the show yet, it's on YouTube.

What I'm thinking about

How much of good software is really just showing people what's already true.

The reports page didn't fix a single contract. It just put the state of things in one place where everyone can see it. But that changes behavior. When a team can see that one open item is all that stands between a contract and a clean record, they go fix it.

If you're a business owner wondering where to start with automation, this might be it. Before you automate a process, try just measuring it. Build one simple view that answers a question you ask every week. You'll learn a lot about where the real bottlenecks are, and the automation you build next will be aimed at the right thing.

Whenever you're ready, here's how I can help

1. Reply with one process that eats your week. A spreadsheet, a reminder you send by hand, a report you rebuild every Monday. I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth automating.
2. Book a 30-minute call if you're weighing a custom app or automation and want a second opinion: calendly.com/patrick-univium/30min
3. If you run events, look up Events on Autopilot on YouTube for conversations with people building better events.

Talk soon,

Patrick