Business Operations Automation

The Business Overhead Problem

The average professional spends 2–3 hours per day on email, administrative tasks, and reporting. These aren't high-judgment activities that require deep expertise. They are mechanical, rule-based workflows: categorize, draft, format, track, organize, report. They consume time that could be spent on actual work — and they're exactly what Co-Work was designed to handle.

The design principle for every workflow in this module: approval gates are the design, not an obstacle. Co-Work drafts. You approve. The action executes. This isn't a limitation of what Co-Work can do — it's the correct architecture for any workflow where an error has real-world consequences. Email that goes to the wrong person. An invoice with incorrect numbers. A payment that shouldn't have been processed.

With that principle in mind, here are the four highest-ROI business automation workflows, drawn from Paul, Jack Roberts, and Brooke Wright.

Email Triage and the Mini-CRM

Paul's email triage system is one of the most documented and widely adopted Co-Work workflows in the community. The core prompt, which he has shared in his OS and Advanced Use Cases content:

Look at all emails in my inbox from the last 24 hours.
For each email, suggest one of: delete, archive, block, or reply.
For emails that need a reply, draft the reply in my voice.
Save client contacts and key information to the Email-CRM folder.

The extended version sets up a mini-CRM pattern that persists across sessions. The folder architecture:

~/CoWork/Operations/Email-CRM/
  claude.md          # CRM role: track client relationships,
                     # identify patterns, surface follow-ups
  memory.md          # Running record of client preferences,
                     # outstanding items, key context
  Drafts/            # Draft replies for review
  Archive/           # Processed threads for reference

The CRM claude.md gives Co-Work a persistent role: it knows who your important clients are, tracks conversation history across sessions, surfaces follow-ups when threads go cold, and maintains a running relationship context that accumulates over time.

Proposal Writing from Discovery Calls

Brooke Wright documented this workflow in her community materials. The process converts the raw material of a discovery call — transcript, notes, verbal commitments — into a formatted proposal that references your actual pricing and scope documentation.

Here is the transcript from my discovery call with [Client].
Generate a proposal using the pricing structure and
service descriptions in business-brain.md.
Scope: [describe what was discussed].
Format: our standard proposal template.

The key enabler is having your pricing, service descriptions, and proposal template already in your Business Brain (Module 2). Co-Work pulls from that context to populate the proposal with real numbers and language — not generic placeholders. The human review step: verify scope accuracy, confirm pricing matches what was discussed, and approve before sending.

Invoice Generation

Jack Roberts describes this as one of the simplest and most reliable Co-Work automations for freelancers and service businesses. The skill takes minimal input and produces a formatted invoice:

Generate an invoice for:
Client: [Name]
Project: [Description]
Amount: [Total]
Due date: [Date]
Save to ~/CoWork/Finance/Invoices/ as [ClientName]-[Month]-invoice.md

The skill handles formatting, numbering, and filing automatically. For businesses with recurring invoices, this becomes a scheduled task: on the first of every month, generate invoices for all active retainer clients (with client list and amounts in the Finance folder's memory file).

Contract Review

Co-Work can analyze contracts for risk categories and negotiation points. The workflow: upload a contract PDF, run the review skill, get a structured output categorizing clauses by risk level with suggested negotiation language.

Review this contract for:
1. Unusual liability clauses (flag as high/medium/low risk)
2. Payment terms (compare to our standard terms)
3. IP ownership provisions
4. Termination clauses
5. Suggested negotiation points for each flagged item

Expense Tracking and Monthly Financial Reports

The receipt scanner workflow is straightforward: Co-Work reads files in a designated receipts folder, extracts amounts, vendors, and dates, and updates a running expense log. The prompt:

Scan all files in ~/CoWork/Finance/Receipts/ that don't have
an entry in expense-log.md yet.
Extract: date, vendor, amount, category.
Update expense-log.md with new entries.
Flag any expenses over $500 for my review.

For monthly financial reporting, Jack Roberts documents a more sophisticated workflow using Mercury MCP (a banking connector for Mercury Bank). The prompt: "Go into Mercury, check current bank balances and all transactions this month, categorize by expense type, create a P&L summary with comparison to last month." The output is a formatted HTML dashboard saved to the Finance folder. This becomes a scheduled task: first of every month at 7 AM.

The Human-in-the-Loop Design Rule

Every workflow in this module follows the same design pattern:

1. Co-Work does the mechanical work (scanning, categorizing, drafting, formatting)
2. Co-Work produces a draft or summary for human review
3. Human reviews and approves or rejects
4. Approved action executes (email sent, invoice delivered, payment processed)

This is not optional for any workflow involving financial transactions, client communications, or legal documents. The approval gate is the architecture — build it in from the start, not as a workaround after something goes wrong.

Add these to your global instructions if they are not there already:

Never send emails. Always save to drafts for my review.
Never process payments or transfers without explicit approval.
Always show me a preview before any irreversible action.
Save all financial documents to the Finance folder — never send directly.