Lesson 2 – The Very First Thing I Ever Automated Was This

The one that started it all

Out of a thousand tedious tasks in my business, there was one that caused me genuine, almost physical pain every single month: collecting invoices from my inbox.

Every month, the same story. Invoices from subscriptions, tools, business partners – scattered across dozens of emails. Some had “invoice” in the subject line, some said “bill,” some arrived as plain PDF attachments with no useful label at all. My job was to find them, download them one by one, organize them into folders, and hand everything over to my accountant. I was always the last person to submit. And honestly? I was never even sure I’d found them all.

If I had actually managed to collect every single invoice, it would have been a miracle. The sheer size of the task was overwhelming – not because any individual step was hard, but because doing it manually, month after month, felt like an endless, thankless chore. It was administration at its worst: the kind of work you’d rather do literally anything else instead of.

The automation that changed everything

So I built my first workflow. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fast. I was completely inexperienced and it took me a painfully long time to get it right. But when it finally worked, something clicked.

The system is simple: it monitors my Gmail inbox continuously, filters out emails that contain attachments with keywords like “invoice,” “bill,” “receipt,” or “faktura,” and automatically saves those PDFs into a dedicated Google Drive folder. That’s it.

At the end of the month, I open one folder. Everything is there. I send it to my accountant – or, if I want, I automate that step too. No digging through emails. No missed invoices. No stress. No guilt.

The real breakthrough

This one workflow – clunky and slow as it was to build – did something far more important than saving me time on invoices. It opened my eyes.

Once I saw it running, I started noticing how many small, repetitive processes exist in my daily business life that make everything harder than it needs to be. Responding to form submissions. Following up on bookings. Sorting through customer data. Creating reports. Every one of these tasks follows the same pattern: data comes in, you do something predictable with it, and the result goes somewhere else. That pattern is automatable.

This invoice workflow was the moment I realized that automation isn’t about replacing yourself – it’s about reclaiming the hours you lose to administration so you can spend them on work that actually matters.

What this means for you

You don’t need to start with something complex. You need to start with something that genuinely bothers you – the one task you keep putting off, the one that drains your energy every time it comes around. That’s your first automation.

In this course, you’ll build a version of this exact workflow (WF2 – Automated Invoice Archiver) with proper structure, error handling, and organization. But more importantly, you’ll develop the same instinct: the ability to look at any repetitive process and think, “I could automate that.”

That shift in thinking is worth more than any single workflow.

This lesson is part of the free introductory module of the “Automate with Make.com” course. Start building: Make.com