‍DISCLAIMER: This case study is based on a real client project; however, the client and project names have been replaced with dog-themed placeholders to protect confidentiality.

Background

Good Boy Booking owns multiple rental properties. When guests book stays online, Good Boy Booking receives a booking confirmation email with details like guest name, check-in/out dates, and property name/address. To track bookings, Good Boy Booking had to manually copy these details from each email into a spreadsheet. They would then send a separate booking confirmation email to the building management where their units were located.

This tedious process took around 2 minutes per booking, equating to 9 hours and 10 minutes per year dedicated solely to administrative booking tasks for Good Boy Booking's 275 average annual bookings. This valuable time could have been better spent on revenue-generating hosting activities.

Solution

To optimize this inefficient process, Good Boy Booking implemented automated workflows connecting Parsio, Zapier, Airtable, and Gmail:

1. When a booking email is received in Gmail it is set to be automatically forwarded to the Parsio account.
2. Parsio instantly parses booking details like guest name, dates, unit number, and property name/address from the incoming booking emails.
3. A Zapier connection detects these new Parsio entries and pushes them into Good Boy Booking's Airtable spreadsheet with pre-defined booking fields.
4. When the Airtable record is created and reviewed, an Airtable automation pulls booking data from Airtable into a pre-written Gmail confirmation template for the property management team.
5. This automated email is sent directly to the management. They then confirm with Good Boy that the booking is in their guest database.

Impact

• Booking process time per guest reduced from 2 min to just 30 seconds.
• Total yearly hours spent on bookings lowered from 9 hours 10 min to 2 hours 25 minutes.
• 6 hours 45 mins saved annually, valued at $230+ based on the average small business owner hourly rate of $33.65 (Small Business Administration).

Instead of repetitive manual work, Good Boy Booking now has an efficient mostly automated system handling bookings end-to-end. This streamlined workflow provides significant ongoing time and cost savings, allowing them to focus on high-value hosting tasks.

Key Takeaway

With the right simple (and usually even free) tools, small businesses can optimize monotonous workflows into efficient automated processes, saving valuable time and money. This is just one task. Now imagine replacing all of your tedious tasks with some form of automation and the time savings that could create.

Want to Optimize Your Business?

If you're looking to reduce costs, increase profits, and gain a competitive advantage like Good Boy Booking did, let's discuss how we can streamline your workflows.