“Once a quarter I pull numbers out of a few spreadsheets and write them up into a board deck.”
Don't automate this
Not worth automating. At 0.5 a month, a $6,000 setup takes 74 months to come back.
We treat anything past 18 months as not worth it: this kind of work usually changes before then.
Not often enough for small savings to add up.
you said "less often than that" — that's about 1 a month
$81 of time a month against $0.36 to run it.
we treat inside 12 months as worth doing and past 18 as not — those cut-offs are our judgement, not arithmetic
draft deck — this one needs to ask first.
Long enough that handing it over is worth something.
you said "1 to 4 hours"; we used the middle of that, 150 minutes
There's a step here that needs reading and interpreting, which is what AI is actually for.
- At 0.5 a month this doesn't pay for itself — it would take 74 months. You'd need about 3.1 a month before it's worth building.
- That $6,000 is what it costs to get this running reliably — setup, a test set, and the first month of fixing it. Set it up yourself over a weekend instead and it's nearer $650 — payback drops to about 8 months.
$6,000 ÷ (12 months × $162 saved per run) = 3.1 a month
Take it to a builder
We don't build it. Your builder does that better than we ever could — it knows every one of its own connectors. Copy this and paste it in.
Open n8n, start a new workflow, and click the ✨ AI button. Paste this in.
Paste into n8n's AI workflow builder. Names the real nodes and says what n8n won't enforce.
Build me this workflow. I've had it designed already — the detail below is deliberate, so please follow it rather than simplifying it. ## What it should do Turn the quarter's spreadsheets into a written board summary. **Finished looks like:** A deck the board can read, with the numbers and what they mean. ## When it should run Once a quarter — trigger it by hand until that's settled Use a Manual Trigger node. ## The steps, in order 1. **read sheets** — Pull the quarter's figures. 2. **summarise changes** — Work out what moved and why it matters. 3. **draft deck** — Write the summary up. - This one is permanent. It cannot be undone once it runs. ## Accounts to connect - Spreadsheets - Notion Use my own credentials for each. Don't hardcode anything. ## Must-haves — please don't skip these - One step changes something outside the system: draft deck. Point it at a test account first. - Don't retry automatically. Nothing here says which errors are safe to retry, and retrying a write without a dedupe key applies it twice. - Give up after 8 steps across the whole run rather than looping. ## What n8n won't enforce on its own A workflow engine. Strong on steps and approvals, blind to agent loops. So after you've built it, these are on me — please leave a note in the workflow for each: - **Iteration ceiling** — the design asks for stop after 8 iterations. Add an execution counter and hard-fail past the limit, or the agent can loop until the bill stops it. - **Typed tool schemas** — the design asks for 3 tools with typed input schemas. Validate the payload yourself before the call, or the model will invent fields. --- Designed with RIG. RIG works out whether a job is worth automating and writes the brief — it doesn't build or run anything.
Their builder will get most of this right and some of it wrong — it always does. The part worth checking is the approvals: builders like adding a notification where the design asked for a hard stop. Everything under "what it won't enforce" is genuinely on you.