Less time spent on order admin
Saved every week across the team
Daniel Reeves
Founder, Alder & Oak
The challenge
Great furniture, buried in paperwork.
Alder & Oak make furniture to order. Every order touched five tools: the shop, a spreadsheet, the workshop board, the accounting software and a long email thread with the customer.
Two people spent most of their week copying details from one place to the next. Mistakes were rare, but each one meant a table cut to the wrong size — and an awkward phone call.
What we built
One quiet layer between the tools they already had.
We didn’t replace anything. A new order in the shop now creates a job on the workshop board, a draft invoice in Xero and a row in Airtable — automatically, in under a minute.
An AI step reads each custom request — sizes, wood, finish — and turns it into a clean spec. Anything unusual goes to a person for a one-click approval in Slack before it reaches the workshop.
The results
Six weeks later.
The flow went live in week six. By week ten, the two people who used to do order admin were spending most of their time talking to customers instead.
Order admin down from 17 to 6 hours per person, per week.
Zero wrong-size orders in the first three months.
New orders reach the workshop in minutes, not the next morning.
They didn’t overwhelm us with options. They just built exactly what we needed. We’re saving 15 hours a week and saw ROI in under two months.
Daniel Reeves
Founder, Alder & Oak
Tools we connected
Shopify
Airtable
Xero
Slack
Gmail
OpenAI
Client
Alder & Oak
Industry
Furniture maker • 40 people
Service
Workflow automation
Timeline
6 weeks, spring 2025
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