Before
Floral Express supplies large customers on fixed delivery dates, at several locations, with a local team in Florida and staff working remotely abroad. Their busiest weeks run from mid-November to mid-December.
The business ran on spreadsheets: separate files for vendors, for the calculations and for what customers saw. Handling those files by hand once sent a customer a file that included cost data. Nothing checked that a customer's price matched the latest one, and margins only got a look after they had already dropped. Vendor bills were typed in from PDFs and checked in pivot tables.
The expensive mistakes were dates. An order with the wrong delivery date or location meant the product was wasted, at $1,000-2,000 each time, several times a year. Written procedures didn't help much: they went out of date within weeks and were rarely read.
What we built
We started small, in January 2025, with one job: turning QuickBooks invoices into clean, multi-page PDFs that email themselves. A monthly retainer followed, and the system grew one piece at a time.
- An order system. FLEX OS holds the orders and checks every one against the customer's delivery schedule before it goes out, so a wrong date is flagged while there's still time to fix it.
- Drafted customer emails. Program managers find the email to the customer already written, and send it themselves.
- Vendor bills read by AI. A vendor's bill goes in as a PDF. The system reads every line, matches it to the orders it belongs to, and holds it for a person to review before it goes into QuickBooks.
- Customer surveys. Customers get a short survey based on what was actually delivered to them.
- Guards and health checks. Duplicate protection on the invoice automation, and a monitor that flags when Airtable and QuickBooks stop agreeing.
- Documentation built from the live system. One page lists every automation and table, what depends on what and what breaks if you change it, with guides for the team and a runbook for when something goes wrong.
It started in Make and Airtable, which got the business off the ground. As it grew, the heavier parts moved to custom code that's easier to maintain.
How it runs week to week
Orders go in and the check runs on every one. The people who write to customers find the emails drafted. Bills arrive as PDFs and come out as reviewed entries in QuickBooks.
When something looks off, the documentation says which automation is involved, what it depends on and how to fix it, so the team can trace a problem to its source.
The paperwork got faster too. Generating a PDF went from 40-60 seconds to about 23 once the work ran in parallel.
Timeline
First project: QuickBooks invoices to PDF
Monthly retainer begins
Vendor PDFs read into QuickBooks, first version
FLEX OS order system starts
FLEX OS order system finished
Customer service and surveys start
Customer service system finished
Results
In June 2026, 362 invoices went through the bill system, and nearly all of them were processed.
The order check caught an order with the wrong delivery date before it became a missed delivery. That's the same kind of mistake that used to cost $1,000-2,000 a time.
The customer surveys get a 20-30% reply rate across the customer programs.
And the owner stepped away from the business for 10 days without operational issues.
What this looks like for your business
If you sell to customers who expect delivery on a fixed date, the costly mistakes are the quiet ones: a wrong date, a price that didn't update, a vendor bill nobody checked against the order.
The fix is much the same for a distributor or a wholesaler. Keep the orders in one place, run checks on every one, and have the paperwork read for you. It can start from the spreadsheets you already have.