I only noticed when she went on holiday.

She did it every evening after the operations calls wrapped — open the booking system, open the allocation sheet, transfer the day's confirmations across. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty when it was busy. We called it admin. We'd always called it admin.

It wasn't admin. It was a live integration between two systems that didn't talk to each other, and the integration was a person.

I found this out when she went on holiday.

Nobody plans for this. You buy a booking tool because it handles payments well. You build a spreadsheet because you need to show room allocations to the accommodation partner. They don't connect, so someone starts copying between them.

That someone gets good at it. Develops a rhythm. Learns the edge cases — what to do when a booking comes in after the partner's cut-off, how to handle a shared room with one occupant, which category a late add-on falls into. None of it gets written down. Why would it? It's just admin.

The person covering had the spreadsheet, the booking system, and a vague description of the task. What she didn't have was three years of accumulated decisions that lived nowhere except the original person's head. By day two, the allocation sheet was showing capacity that wasn't there. By day three, we had a double booking.

We fixed it. It wasn't a disaster. But the fix took two people most of a morning, and the conversation with the affected guests was uncomfortable. The cover person hadn't made a careless mistake. She'd tried to do the job properly without having the information the job actually required.

You don't have to automate it straight away. But you do have to understand what it actually is.

Sit with whoever does yours — properly, not for five minutes. Map out every decision they make. Not 'transfers bookings to the sheet' but the actual logic: what triggers a transfer, what gets checked, what the edge cases are, what a wrong row looks like. When you write it out, you'll almost certainly find it's more involved than you thought.

Once you can see it, you have options. Sometimes you simplify the logic. Sometimes you realise it should live in a proper tool. Sometimes you document it well enough that a second person can hold it. Any of those is better than where you are.

We eventually built a proper sync between the two systems. Took a few weeks. The person who'd been doing the nightly transfer said it was one of the best things we'd done for her — which told me something about how much invisible work it had been.

The integration had always existed. We just hadn't realised it was a person. If yours sounds familiar, I'm happy to talk.