Pillar Guide · Google Sheets Automation

Most teams already live in Google Sheets. The problem isn't the tool — it's the manual work piled on top of it. Aurelle builds lightweight, reliable automation systems on top of the spreadsheets your team already uses, so the busywork disappears and the data stays clean.

Explore what we automate

What it actually means

Less spreadsheet babysitting. More business.

Google Sheets automation is the practice of replacing the repetitive, manual steps inside your spreadsheets — copying rows, sending update emails, refreshing dashboards, chasing data — with small, well-built systems that run on their own.

At Aurelle we keep it grounded. No giant platform migration, no rip-and-replace. We work inside the Sheets your team already trusts, then layer on Apps Script, macros, dashboards, and integrations where they earn their keep.

Five things we automate most

Where Sheets automation actually pays off.

01

Email automation from Sheets

Most ops teams already track work in a spreadsheet — deals in a pipeline tab, orders in a fulfilment tab, tasks in a project tab. The problem isn't the tracking, it's everything that has to happen after a row changes: status updates to clients, internal alerts, follow-up reminders, daily summaries. Email automation closes that gap. Instead of someone re-reading the sheet at the end of the day and copy-pasting messages into Gmail, the spreadsheet itself decides who needs to hear what, and sends the right email at the right moment — every time, with no missed handoffs.

  • Status-change notifications to clients & teams

    When a row's status moves from 'In review' to 'Approved', the right people get an email instantly — your client, your delivery lead, the relevant Slack channel. The message is templated, branded, and pulls live values from the row itself, so context is never lost in translation.

  • Daily / weekly digests from a single tab

    Replace the 'send me an update' Monday email with an automated digest. Filter the sheet by owner, team, or status, format the rows into a clean HTML email, and schedule it to land in inboxes before the day starts. Stakeholders see what they need without anyone manually compiling it.

  • Reminder sequences tied to dates in your sheet

    Renewal in 30 days. Invoice due tomorrow. Onboarding step overdue. We turn the date columns you already have into multi-step reminder sequences — including stop-on-reply logic, escalation to a manager after N days, and an audit log written back into the sheet so nothing is ever 'lost'.

Real example

A boutique agency was sending 40+ project status emails per week by hand — 6 hours of senior PM time gone every Friday. We added a status column with a dropdown, wrote an Apps Script trigger on edit, and connected three Gmail templates. The moment a project moves to 'Delivered', 'Awaiting feedback', or 'Revisions in progress', the client gets the right branded email with the latest deliverable link, and the internal ops channel is pinged. PM time on emails dropped from 6 hours to about 20 minutes a week.

What to watch out for

The most common mistake is automating email before the sheet is reliable. If column headers shift, statuses are inconsistently spelled, or two people own the same row, you'll send the wrong email to the wrong person at scale. Always lock columns, validate dropdowns, and dry-run with a 'preview only' mode for the first week before going live.

Read the full breakdown
02

Data entry automation

Almost every operations bottleneck eventually traces back to one place: a human being copying values from one tab, tool, or PDF into another. It's slow, it's error-prone, and it scales linearly with team size — every new client, vendor, or product makes it worse. Data entry automation removes the human as the integration. Forms, emails, exports, and partner files all flow into one clean source of truth, get validated on entry, and are then made available to dashboards, CRMs, and downstream automations. The team stops being a copy-paste machine and starts doing the work only humans can do.

  • Form → Sheet → CRM pipelines

    Typeform, Tally, Google Forms, even branded custom web forms — submissions land directly in your sheet, get cleaned and enriched (deduped, country-detected, owner-assigned), then sync into HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Notion in one move. No human sees the row unless something fails validation.

  • Auto-import from email attachments & exports

    Vendor PDFs, supplier CSVs, monthly bank statements, daily marketplace exports — we parse them on arrival and append normalised rows to the right tab. Per-vendor templates handle the messy reality that every supplier formats their data slightly differently.

  • Validation rules that catch bad data on entry

    Every automation pipeline includes guardrails: required fields, format checks (emails, phone numbers, currencies), duplicate detection, and conditional formatting that flags anything weird in red. Bad data is caught the moment it enters the sheet — not three weeks later in a board report.

Real example

A small ecommerce brand was rebuilding inventory by hand from three supplier exports each Monday — about 4 hours of warehouse-manager time, with regular typos that caused stockouts. We built three vendor-specific parsers, a master inventory tab with validation, and a one-click reconciliation macro. Monday morning is now a 10-minute review instead of a 4-hour rebuild, and stockout incidents from data errors went from 3-4 per month to zero in the first quarter.

What to watch out for

Teams often automate the input pipeline without ever deciding who owns the source of truth. If two systems can both 'win' on the same field (your CRM and your sheet, or two supplier feeds for the same SKU), you'll create silent data conflicts that are worse than the manual process. Always pick one master per field before you wire the pipes.

Read the full breakdown
03

Google Sheets dashboards

There's a moment every founder hits where the business has 'all the data', but no one can answer 'how are we doing this week' without 20 minutes of digging. Sheets dashboards solve that without forcing a switch to Looker, Tableau, or an expensive BI seat. Built right, a Sheets dashboard pulls from your CRM, payments stack, ops tools, and ad accounts on a schedule, then renders the 8–12 numbers that actually run the business on one tab — with charts, traffic lights, and trend deltas. Your team opens the dashboard, sees the truth in 10 seconds, and gets back to work.

  • Sales, ops & finance KPI dashboards

    MRR, pipeline coverage, win rate, top accounts; project margins, on-time delivery, capacity per team; burn, runway, AR aging — pulled live from Stripe, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Shopify, or whatever combination you already pay for. One dashboard per audience, scoped to the metrics they actually act on.

  • Multi-source roll-ups (Stripe, HubSpot, Shopify, etc.)

    Most businesses have data in 4–8 systems by year three. We use Apps Script and direct APIs to roll those sources up into a single normalised dataset inside Sheets, so cross-system questions ('what's our blended CAC across both stores plus the new B2B pipeline?') become a formula, not a project.

  • Auto-refresh on a schedule you control

    Hourly during business hours, nightly for finance, on-demand for board prep — every dashboard refreshes on the cadence that fits the audience. We also build in a clear 'last refreshed' stamp and failure alerts, so when an upstream source is down you know immediately rather than presenting stale numbers.

Real example

A 12-person SaaS team had MRR in Stripe, pipeline in HubSpot, and ops metrics in three internal sheets. Their weekly leadership meeting started with 30 minutes of someone screen-sharing tabs and explaining numbers. We built a single Sheets dashboard refreshed hourly: MRR, net new, churn, pipeline coverage, top 5 deals, NPS trend. The leadership meeting now opens with the dashboard already on screen, and the conversation jumps straight to decisions instead of data lookup.

What to watch out for

The biggest dashboard failure mode is putting too much on one tab. If a dashboard has 40 metrics, no one looks at any of them. We force a brutal 'top 10 only' rule per audience and push everything else to drill-down tabs. The dashboard's job isn't to show every number — it's to show the numbers that change a decision this week.

Read the full breakdown
04

Apps Script for non-coders

Apps Script is the most powerful and most overlooked tool in the entire Google Workspace stack. It runs natively inside Sheets, Gmail, Drive, and Calendar; it's free; and it can do almost anything a small SaaS tool would charge you for — without adding another monthly bill. The catch is that nobody on your team wants to learn JavaScript on a Tuesday afternoon. Our job is to write the script, wrap it in a button or menu that feels like a native Sheets feature, and document it so anyone can run it. Your team gets the power of code without ever touching code.

  • Custom menus & one-click buttons

    Generate the report, send the email batch, archive last quarter's rows, push the export to Drive — whatever your team does manually becomes a single named menu item at the top of the sheet. The team clicks; the script handles the rest, with progress toasts and a clear success/failure message.

  • Scheduled jobs (nightly, hourly, on-event)

    Time-based triggers handle the recurring rituals: nightly cleanup, hourly inventory syncs, Monday-morning digest emails. Event-based triggers (on-edit, on-form-submit) react instantly when a row changes. We also wire Slack or email failure alerts so you hear about a broken script immediately, not next quarter.

  • Internal documentation so you're never locked in

    Every script ships with inline code comments, a one-page handover doc explaining what it does and where the triggers live, and a short Loom walkthrough for your team. Six months from now, when someone new joins, they can read the doc and understand the system without calling us.

Real example

A consulting firm had a partner spending 45 minutes every Friday assembling the weekly utilisation report — pulling timesheets, formatting per-consultant tables, and emailing the leadership group. We built an Apps Script that pulls the underlying data, builds the formatted report in a fresh tab, exports it to PDF, and emails it to a configurable distribution list. It now runs every Friday at 5pm with zero human input, and the partner re-claimed about 3 hours per month of senior time.

What to watch out for

Teams sometimes treat Apps Script as a shortcut to skip thinking about the data model. If your underlying sheet structure is messy, scripts on top of it will be brittle and break with every column reorder. Apps Script multiplies whatever's underneath it — so we always clean and lock the base sheet structure before adding any automation on top.

Read the full breakdown
05

Macros & recurring tasks

If a member of your team can describe a task as 'every Monday I do this same sequence of clicks for 30 minutes', that task is a macro waiting to be built. Macros are the smallest unit of automation: one named action that replaces a long sequence of manual steps. They don't replace people, they replace ritual. Done well, they free up the highest-leverage hour of the week — Monday morning — and they compound: a 30-minute macro saved per week is 26 hours per year, per person. Across an ops team, that's a meaningful slice of headcount returned to actual work.

  • Weekly report generation

    Pull the data, filter to the right segment, format the table, build the chart, save a versioned copy, email the recipient list — one click. The macro replaces the Monday morning ritual that nobody enjoys and that produces inconsistent output depending on who runs it.

  • Bulk formatting & cleanup macros

    Standardise column types, fix capitalisation, deduplicate rows, validate against a master list — across thousands of rows in seconds. Built once and re-used forever; we include an undo-safe pattern and an audit log so you can always see what the macro touched.

  • Recurring data exports & archives

    Auto-archive old rows to a history tab. Push monthly snapshots to Drive or BigQuery for compliance. Export filtered datasets to CSV for finance every month-end. Quietly running on a schedule, with retention policies that match how your business actually wants to keep data.

Real example

A B2B sales team had two reps spending 25 minutes each every Monday cleaning their CRM export — fixing capitalisation in company names, splitting a combined 'Region' field into Country/State, and removing leads that had bounced. We replaced it with a one-click 'Clean weekly export' macro. The cleanup takes about 3 seconds, runs identically every time, and freed roughly 4 person-hours per month — repurposed to outbound calls.

What to watch out for

Macros recorded by the built-in Sheets recorder break the moment the underlying sheet structure changes — a new column inserted, a renamed tab, a reformatted header. We rewrite recorded macros into proper Apps Script that references columns by header name rather than position, so a structural change doesn't silently corrupt every Monday's report.

Read the full breakdown

Why teams hire us

Practical systems. No platform lock-in.

Built on Sheets you own

Everything lives in your Google Workspace. No new SaaS bill, no vendor lock-in.

Documented & handed over

Every system ships with a short Loom and a one-pager. Your team owns it from day one.

Small, sharp, fast

Most projects ship in 1–3 weeks. We scope tightly so you see ROI quickly.

Common questions

Everything teams ask before hiring us.

Most projects ship in 1–3 weeks. A single workflow automation (like email triggers) takes about a week. A connected dashboard system takes 2–3 weeks. Full end-to-end business systems with multiple integrations take 3–4 weeks. We confirm scope and timeline before starting, with no surprises and no scope creep. If we hit something genuinely complex mid-build, we tell you immediately and re-scope rather than push the deadline silently.

Selected work

Two recent Sheets builds.

Consistency Checker Across Multiple Sheets

Consistency Checker Across Multiple Sheets

Problem

Data drifting between multiple sub-files and a single master sheet, causing reporting errors.

Solution

Apps Script tool that scans every sub-file and flags mismatches against the master in real time.

Result

One source of truth across every department file.

Quotation Template + Email Automation

Quotation Template + Email Automation

Problem

Sales reps manually building quotes and chasing approvals through email.

Solution

Apps Script generates branded quote PDFs from a template and sends them automatically.

Result

Quotes out the door in seconds, not hours.

Ready when you are

Book a free 30-minute call. We'll look at your current Sheets, spot the one or two automations that would buy back the most time, and tell you honestly if it's worth doing.