The SOP you already wrote
A lot of small businesses have a Google Doc called something like “New wholesale customer” or “Monday admin”. Somebody wrote it for a new hire two years ago. It’s mostly right. Nobody has touched it since, and the person who wrote it still does the job by hand every week, because explaining it to someone takes longer than doing it.
That doc is the quickest way to teach dassi a job, and it’s one of the starting points dassi itself suggests when you first open it. With the wholesale-customer doc it goes roughly like this:
- Open the doc and ask dassi to turn it into a workflow.
- It reads the steps and comes back with questions about the vague ones. Step 3 says “send the welcome pack”, and there are two versions in your Drafts, US and EU, so which one? Step 5 says “add them to the price list”, but does that mean the Wholesale tab or a new sheet per customer?
- You answer, then run it once together. dassi does the work in your browser, in Shopify and Gmail and the price sheet, while you watch and correct anything it gets wrong.
- It saves the result as a workflow. Run it whenever a new wholesale order comes in, or put it on a schedule.
Step 2 is where most of the value turns up. The questions land on exactly the steps the SOP never explained properly, the ones that lived in someone’s head, so you end up with a better doc as a side effect.
Filling templates
Quotes, proposals, onboarding packs and anything else that starts life as a copy of a template are good candidates. Say your quote template lives in Docs and your prices live in a supplier sheet. The workflow reads the customer’s request email for items and quantities, looks each item up in the sheet, makes a copy of the template named with the customer and date, fills in the line items and totals, and leaves it in your Quotes folder with a note about any item it couldn’t price. It doesn’t send anything unless you’ve taught it to, and even then sending is the step most people put behind an approval. If your prices come from supplier websites rather than a sheet, that’s a longer job, written up separately as supplier research to quotation.
Docs that mirror other sites
Some docs exist only to repeat information from somewhere else. The shipping-rates cheat sheet for whoever packs orders is the usual one, though returns-policy summaries and notes on what competitors charge behave the same way, and they all go stale quietly. A weekly run can visit the sources, compare them with what the doc says, update the table and put a dated line at the top listing what changed.
On a shared doc I’d have it work in Suggesting mode. Every change then appears as a suggestion that someone accepts or rejects, which is a better approval step than anything we could bolt on, and version history is there if something slips through anyway.
Limits
Docs is a rich editor and dassi edits it through the page, the way you do. Plain text, headings and simple tables go smoothly. Heavy layouts with nested tables and images are slower, and now and then a formatting detail needs a manual fix. It can only open docs your account can open. The text it reads goes to the AI model you chose, through dassi’s relay if you’re on included credits, so think twice before pointing it at a doc full of salaries. Scheduled runs happen in your own browser, which has to be open at the time. Most of these jobs lean on a spreadsheet somewhere, so the Google Sheets page is a natural next read. And if what you have is less an SOP than a pile of weekly logins, try recurring browser administration.