The Spreadsheet Chore You Do Every Week Is a Bug

The Spreadsheet Chore You Do Every Week Is a Bug

Every Friday, someone on your team spends two hours on the same spreadsheet. They copy last week’s data, paste it into the report tab, fix the rows that broke, delete the formulas someone overwrote, and email it out. Next Friday, same thing.

That is not a workflow. It is a bug you pay for weekly.

The problem

Manual spreadsheet chores fail in the same three ways, every time:

  1. It eats real hours. Thirty minutes daily is 10 hours a month. Recurring chores scale with volume, so the cost grows as the business grows.
  2. It breaks silently. A renamed tab, a shifted column, a formula overwritten by a paste. The report goes out wrong and nobody notices for weeks.
  3. Only one person can do it. The chore lives in someone’s head. They are out, the chore waits or goes wrong.

Nobody automates it because “it’s only 30 minutes” and because building the automation yourself means learning a scripting API you will touch once a year.

How it is done

The automation is built around your actual sheet, not a generic template:

  1. Map the chore. You describe what you do by hand, step by step, with your frequency. No calls, just the intake form.
  2. Build inside your file. The automation lives in your Google Sheet or Excel workbook, as a bound script or advanced formulas. Nothing external to install or maintain.
  3. Run it on your data. Before you accept it, the automation runs end to end on a copy of your real data, side by side with the manual version, so you can see it works.
  4. Flag the bad rows. Messy input does not get silently skipped. Bad or missing rows are flagged, so nothing disappears quietly.
  5. Write the setup notes. Plain-English instructions for running it yourself, including what to do when the inputs change and how to recover from the three most likely errors.

What you get

  • One automated workflow (data entry, cleanup, a recurring report, or a scheduled calculation) running in your own file.
  • A before-and-after run on your real data, so you see the result before you trust it.
  • Setup notes a non-technical user can follow.
  • Error handling that flags bad rows instead of skipping them.
  • One revision round within 7 days of delivery.

Delivery is typically within 3 business days, installed in your sheet or as a copy you can move. If delivery is more than 5 business days late, you get a full refund.

Pricing: from $1,200 per engagement, priced per source (a workbook, a Sheets folder, a CSV set, or an API source). Spreadsheet automation is priced as data work under the current sheet. Every engagement starts with a free scoping review (48-hour turnaround, a real one-page findings document). Pay on acceptance.

Start with the free scoping review

Read the full service spec: Spreadsheet Automation.

This service is produced with AI tooling under a human-owned business (Echelon Luxury Services LLC). Every deliverable passes a second-model review against the acceptance checklist before it reaches you.