A seven-day reporting cycle became a scheduled evening job

Every sales report was built in Excel one at a time and emailed to each recipient separately — a cycle of about a week. It now runs itself every weekday evening, and the only human step left is the CFO pressing approve.

The client

US medical-device manufacturer. Published anonymously at the client’s request — no company name and no person’s name appears in this entry.

The problem

Each regional director and each outside rep needed their own Excel report. Every file was built by hand, then emailed separately, recipient by recipient.

The whole cycle took around seven days by the client's own account — which also meant the numbers a rep received described a week that had already finished.

Because every file was assembled manually, a wrong figure could reach a recipient before anyone noticed, and the correction was another round of emails.

What was built

• An n8n pipeline on a weekday-evening schedule that reads the previous day's orders.
• A split by regional director and by outside rep, generating one Excel file for each.
• One summary email to the CFO with every file attached and an approve button — reports leave only after that approval.
• Monday runs report Friday's data rather than an empty weekend.
• Orders counted by unique document number, so a multi-line order is one order.
• A rep with no sales gets no email, but still appears in the CFO summary — so an absence of sales is visible instead of looking like a missing report.

Before and after

	Before	After
Reporting cycle	About 7 days	Same evening, every weekday
Excel files built by hand	One per regional director and per rep	None
Emails sent by a person	One per recipient	One approval, which releases all of them
Wrong numbers reaching recipients	Caught after sending, if at all	The approval gate sits before any report leaves

How each figure was measured

Reporting cycle

The before figure is the client's own account of the manual cycle, not an instrumented baseline. The after figure is the pipeline's schedule: it reads the previous day's orders and the files are ready that evening.

Excel files built by hand

The pipeline generates every file; no manual assembly step remains in the runbook.

Emails sent by a person

Count of send actions a person performs in a normal run.

Wrong numbers reaching recipients

Position of the human check in the flow. Approval is the last gate, so a figure the CFO rejects never reaches a rep's inbox.

What is deliberately not here

The approval step was kept on purpose. Removing it would make the pipeline fully hands-off and also remove the only thing standing between a bad figure and every rep's inbox.

Client feedback

Their work became easier since the automation.

The other engagements

• Eleven data sources in one dashboard — and stale numbers labelled stale
• A 40-node content pipeline that runs without supervision
• Eight contract sources consolidated — and the silent data loss stopped