Small-business automations

Three working automations for made-up local businesses: lead follow-up for a plumber, invoice reminders for a cleaning company and review requests for a salon. Each one cleans messy real-world data, never sends the same message twice, never fails silently, and keeps quiet at night. Zero dependencies, Node 20+.

The businesses are invented for the demo: every address ends in .example and every phone number is a 555 number, so nothing here can reach a real person.

Automation	For	What it does
Lead follow-up	Northfield Plumbing Co.	Every website inquiry gets an instant reply and the owner an alert with the phone number; two friendly follow-ups (after 1 and 3 days) unless the customer replies first. The same person sending the form twice is one conversation.
Invoice reminders	Cannon River Cleaning	Reads the open-invoices export (QuickBooks, Wave, Square or a sheet) and sends reminders 3, 7 and 14 days after the due date, with partial payments shown. At 30 days the owner is told to step in. A list every Monday.
Review requests	Juniper & Rose Salon	A thank-you with the Google review link a couple of hours after each visit; never after a no-show or cancellation, never twice in 180 days, never to anyone who said stop.

Try it

npm test        # 10 tests, messy data included
npm run demo    # a simulated week of all three; every email lands in demo/outbox/

The demo prints the week as it happens:

Lead follow-up: Northfield Plumbing Co. (made up)
  Mon 09:10  form: {"name":"MARIA GONZALEZ","email":"Maria.Gonzalez@Gmial.com","phone":"507.555.0110",...}
  Mon 09:10  -> owner@northfield-plumbing.example    New inquiry: Maria Gonzalez
  Mon 09:10  -> maria.gonzalez@gmail.com             Thanks for contacting Northfield Plumbing Co.
  Mon 09:40  -> owner@northfield-plumbing.example    Maria wrote again
  Mon 21:15  -> wei.chen@example.com                 Thanks for contacting Northfield Plumbing Co.
  Tue 10:00  -> owner@northfield-plumbing.example    New inquiry with no way to reply automatically: Bob
  Tue 10:00  -> maria.gonzalez@gmail.com             Following up: Northfield Plumbing Co.
  Tue 15:00  Maria replied: her follow-ups stop
  Wed 09:00  -> wei.chen@example.com                 Following up: Northfield Plumbing Co.
  Fri 09:00  -> wei.chen@example.com                 Still happy to help: Northfield Plumbing Co.

The promises, and how each is kept

Never twice. Every message has a key (invoice:1042:day-7, lead:<id>:follow-up:1). A key that went out is never sent again, however often the automation runs, so it can safely run every few minutes and after a restart. (core/mail.js)

Never silently. A send that fails is retried three times with growing waits, then the owner is told what didn’t go and why, and it’s tried again on the next run. A send that was cut off halfway (a crash, a lost connection) is not repeated blindly: the owner gets a “check by hand” note instead. If even the owner’s alert can’t be sent, it is written to the state file and printed.

Messy data, nothing guessed. Names in capitals, emails with typos (@gmial.com), phones in any format, dates as 10/02/2026, Oct 25 2026 or 2026-10-20, money as $1,240.00. What can be cleaned is; what can’t (an impossible date, an email with no @) goes to the owner with the reason, never into an email. (core/normalize.js, shared with csv-contact-cleaner)

Business hours and quiet hours. Time is the business’s own (America/Chicago here), daylight saving included: a reminder is never a day early, follow-ups and review requests wait for 9 a.m. instead of arriving at night, and invoice reminders go out on weekdays only. An instant reply is the exception: the customer just wrote. (core/time.js)

The state survives a crash. What was sent is kept in one JSON file written atomically (a new file, then a rename), so a power cut can’t leave half a file. (core/store.js)

People stay in charge. Every follow-up stops the moment the customer replies; a 30-days-late invoice goes to the owner, not to a fourth email; anyone who replies “stop” to a review request is never asked again; everyone gets the same public review link (asking only happy customers is against Google’s rules).

How this is used for a real client

For a real business the same logic runs inside their own accounts:

Their tools’ own features first. If the booking tool, point of sale or accounting app can already send reminders or review requests, I switch those on and set them up properly instead of writing code. Custom code is for what their tools can’t do.
The transport is theirs. Here, outbox() writes each email to a folder. In a client’s setup it is their own email account or the tool they already use; the keys, retries and alerts stay the same.
Tested on their messy data first. A dry run on a copy of their real export, every message read by a person before anything goes live.

Limits (on purpose, for small businesses)

The state is a JSON file: right for a few thousand customers, not for a large company’s database.
The lead server (lead-follow-up/server.js) is a minimal webhook with a shared secret. In production it sits behind HTTPS (Caddy or the host’s proxy).
Text messages aren’t included: they need a paid SMS provider per client, set up in their account.

MIT licence.