Writing · AI / Automation / Tech

2026-10-05
My PMS software has a dashboard. I can look at it. I can't change it. Changing it takes an expert, an invoice, and somebody else's permission. Power BI and Tableau will get you a better one. The license is cheap: Power BI Pro runs $14 a user a month. One Power BI consulting firm prices a small company's first few dashboards at $5,000 to $25,000 and puts more than half of that on data engineering, getting the data out of your systems and into shape. Even the people selling it will tell you the charts are the cheap part. As the owner, I don't get a data feed. I get a login that can look at reports and schedule them. So I used what I had. Email. 23 reports now go out on auto-send to a bot. Rent roll and pre-lease every day, leasing and work orders every week, financials every month. The bot accepts mail that really comes from the PM software and nothing else, drops the reports into one database, and every morning at 7 it rebuilds the dashboard behind a password. If a report doesn't show up or doesn't tie out, the dashboard says so instead of guessing. The setup was the coolest part to me. Computer use, where the AI drives the mouse and keyboard, used to be clunky and slow. This time I pointed Claude Opus 5.5 at my browser, logged in to my owner account, and went to work on other projects, and it built a schedule for every one of those reports, picked the dates, picked the file format, pointed every one at the bot, and then it went back and reopened every single one and checked it field by field Want a new chart? I ask for it. Last week I told it to rip out the auto-generated to-do list. Gone. No consultant, no change order, and no extra cost on top of the Claude subscription Email is about as obvious as it gets. Reminds me of a quote from Charlie Munger "Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric."
AI / Automation / Tech

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