Three hundred automations run the back office. One process keeps them honest.
We built the automation layer behind billing, ad material, shipping, content, leads and reporting on Zapier and n8n together, with Claude Code to build and change it in hours, and the monitoring that lets a small team trust it.
Billing meant raising invoices by hand. Ad material was chased by email. Shipping lists were assembled from Salesforce reports. Articles were posted one at a time. Every process lived in someone's head and stopped when they were away.
About 200 zaps and 105 n8n workflows carry those processes end to end: Zapier where the team needs to see and tweak things, n8n where the logic is heavy. All of it mapped, monitored in one Slack channel, and changed through one reviewed process.
Nothing fails quietly
Every automation, in Zapier or n8n, reports to one Slack channel the minute it errors. Dropped work is found and re-run. A nightly check confirms that what should have happened did. Each incident became a permanent guard, so the same failure never costs a second day.
A change takes an hour, not a week
Anyone on the team describes the change in plain English. Claude Code scopes it, writes a proposal with alternatives, builds and tests it, and a second review approves it before it is deployed and watched in production the same morning. Engineers review; they are no longer the bottleneck.
Every automation earns its keep
Zapier carries the quick glue the team can see and own. n8n carries the heavy, logic-rich flows. Each one is mapped to the process it serves and the number it protects: invoice-to-cash, ad-material turnaround, lead response time.
Results
- Automations in production
- ~200 zaps + 105 workflows
- Back-office processes covered
- 6
- Staff hours saved per month
- 400+
- Change turnaround
- 1 week → same day
- Automation layer cost
- $4,000 → $150 a month on the AI funnel
- Silent failures
- 0, every error alerts
“Zapier for what the team should own, n8n for what should never break. One map over both.”