House of Motorrad

House of Motorrad is the last traditional motorcycle shop in Boulder County. I previously worked for them in the Summer of 2023 as an apprentice mechanic, but have since moved on to other things (I still hang around, and motorcycles are still present in my life).

August 31st, 2024

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Quickbooks cannot provide an accurate list of invoices paid in the last month. If the invoice is created and paid in the same month, this is not an issue. Within shop policy, only those invoices paid are counted in payroll, making this incongruence incredibly time expensive.

Previously, a system of checks was in place:

1. Invoices were printed and stacked after the customer paid
2. A spreadsheet was manually updated after an invoice was paid, only making use of basic formulas within the sheet

This system works – it’s old fashioned – but it works. The only error is human error: when someone forgets to print a second invoice and it gets missed in the spreadsheet. But there are other issues: double counting invoices, lack of standards for noting comped work, etc.

The aim of this project was a simple, reliable, and accurate integration with sheets to use the data already in Quickbooks for accounting purposes.

Solution

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Using n8n (an automation platform, I've come to adore it) in the background, I revised the current spreadsheets in use by the shop, keeping the spirit, style and simplicity while improving functionality. Payroll shouldn't be complicated.

Hooking into the Quickbooks API, n8n ports all fully paid invoices from the last month into a new tab. A separate tab is created at the shop by duplicating the previous month, which grabs all data added by n8n and performs all calculations immediately.

Further, new sections were added to keep track of amendments and double earnings. Now there’s a record of these events and it’s integrated right into the sheet, automatically included in all calculations.

Catching several errors made by the old system (forgotten invoices, double paid, etc) during testing, what remains is a reliable and far more accurate payroll system with very little friction to begin use.

All values are controlled from one place, and sheet references are dynamic, allowing for payroll to be completed in under a minute. (Numbers, names, and any values have been generated randomly and do not reflect reality)