5 automations every small business needs

The setup most small businesses are missing

If you run a business with 1–20 people, you're probably losing 10–15 hours a week to work that a workflow could do for free. Here are the five we set up most often.

1. Inbox triage

What it does: Every new email is read by AI, categorised (lead / support / spam / other), and routed to the right place — Slack channel, Notion DB, CRM, or just archived.

Stack: Gmail → n8n → OpenAI / Claude → Slack + Notion.

Saves: ~5 hours/week. Plus zero leads slip through the cracks.

2. Document → structured data

What it does: A PDF lands in a Google Drive folder. n8n pulls it, sends it to a vision model, and writes the structured data into a spreadsheet or DB. Invoices, contracts, receipts.

Stack: Drive watcher → n8n → Claude vision → Google Sheets / Airtable.

Saves: ~3 hours/week and removes a tedious task no one wanted.

3. Lead enrichment

What it does: A new lead form submission triggers a flow that looks up the company, finds the LinkedIn profile, scores the lead, and posts the enriched record to your CRM.

Stack: Webhook → n8n → Clearbit / Apollo → AI scoring → HubSpot / Pipedrive.

Saves: ~2 hours/week and your sales team gets warmer leads.

4. Review monitoring

What it does: Every new Google / Trustpilot / Yelp review is pulled, sentiment-analysed, and posted to Slack. Negative reviews get a priority alert with a suggested response draft.

Stack: Polling → n8n → AI sentiment → Slack DM.

Saves face. Negative reviews handled in hours instead of weeks.

5. Recurring report

What it does: Every Monday at 8am, n8n pulls last week's numbers from your tools (Stripe, GA4, Shopify, whatever), runs them through AI for a 200-word summary, and posts to a Slack channel.

Stack: Cron → n8n → API fans-in → AI summary → Slack.

Replaces the weekly "where are we at" meeting.

Where to start

Pick the one that hurts most. Build it in a weekend or have us do it in 2–3 days. Once you see one work, the next four follow naturally.