Notes from building SideQuest Automation. New posts when there's something worth saying.
Today's PO landed in Gmail at 1:39 AM. A scanned image from a customer not yet in QuickBooks, with two SKUs the catalog had never seen. Forty-five seconds later, Estimate 1001 was live. Here's the minute-by-minute.
A Google OAuth client secret for our Gmail integration leaked to a public repo this morning. Live for 36 hours. The minute-by-minute timeline of the rotation, and what we changed to keep it from happening again.
Claude can do all the work to draft an Estimate. We let it. We don't let it press Send. The cost of a bad QB record is shipping cost and accounting cleanup. The cost of an unsent draft is twenty seconds of friction. The two are not comparable.
The handwritten PO is the test case nobody wants to talk about. Phone photos, faxes, pen-corrected scans. Here's how the vision pipeline handles them, where it still trips, and the cost question we had to answer.
A 12,500-POs-a-year distributor burns 970 hours typing line items into QuickBooks. That's $63k at $65/hr fully loaded. The dollar figure is the small part of the story. The real cost is who has to do it.
Get the SKU mapping wrong and nothing else matters. Four match paths in order of confidence: exact SKU, cross-reference, description-only, unmatched. How each one works and what to do with the output.
Three weeks shadowing inside-sales reps at four industrial distributors taught us where the typing tax actually lives. It is not the typing. It is who has to do it.