Why I’m handing my boring work to robots

A weekly review at work used to eat about 9.5 hours of management time, most of it in one long meeting where we read out departments that were perfectly fine. Now, on the activities we measured, it takes under half an hour. That’s about 9 hours a week back, or roughly 470 hours a year. I didn’t hire anyone or buy new software. I built eight small Power Automate flows that do the chasing, collecting and summarising for us. They don’t take tea breaks, and they never forget to send the reminder. I’ll show you exactly how in my next post.

First, a quick hello, and an explanation of why a finance person is writing an automation blog.

Who I am

I’m Karl, and I work in hotel finance. I’ve worked my way up through the finance team at The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, a five-star hotel that’s part of a global hotel group, and today I’m an Assistant Director of Finance. Like most finance roles, mine came with a surprising amount of copying, pasting, chasing emails and rebuilding the same spreadsheet every week. If Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V were a qualification, I’d have a doctorate.

Then I started learning Power Automate, Microsoft’s tool for getting apps like Outlook, Excel, Forms, SharePoint and Teams to pass work between each other, so you don’t have to be the middleman. I’m still learning. I’m not a developer, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way (one of them gets a whole post of its own). But even my first project made a real difference, and that got me hooked.

And the time saved turned out to be only part of it. We now have one place to see which departments have responded and which haven’t, and a proper record of every confirmation and answer instead of an archaeological dig through old emails. The meeting where we went through every department line by line is gone too. Now we only talk about the real exceptions.

Why KarlPilot

Yes, the name is a nod to Microsoft Copilot. The idea is simple: put the boring, repeatable work on autopilot, and keep the humans in the cockpit for the parts that need judgement.

KarlPilot is me learning in public, mistakes and all. Every post is built around something real:

• Real flows. What I built, step by step, using sample data you can copy.
• Real numbers. Before-and-after timings, measured honestly. No inflated savings, no “I 10x’d my team overnight” headlines.
• Real mistakes. The bugs that caught me out, so they don’t catch you too.

I still spend a lot of my day in Excel, so alongside the flows I’m building practical Excel tools for finance work, such as bank reconciliations, budgets and cash flow. I’ll share those here as they’re ready.

What’s coming next

The first series follows that weekly review from start to finish. It’s eight connected flows, which is a lot for one sitting, so I’m splitting it into bite-sized posts:

1. How I freed up 9 hours a week from a payroll review with Power Automate. The full story: the problem, how the eight flows fit together, and the results, including the benefits beyond time saved.
2. How to stop Power Automate sending the same email twice. A simple trick that makes a flow safe to re-run, and spares you the awkward “please ignore my last email”.
3. Pre-filled Microsoft Forms links from Power Automate. So nobody has to retype codes or dates ever again.

After that come posts on error handling, the mistake that left my failed emails quietly stuck (learn from my pain), and how to measure an automation without overclaiming.

One question for you

What’s the most boring task in your week? Leave a comment or reply to the email. I read every one, and the best ideas may become future posts.

Thanks for reading. See you in the next one.