Automating the boring parts on purpose

At MyRain Sprinkler Systems, someone opened a supplier price list, compared it line by line against what was live on the store, and updated the differences by hand. It worked. It also ate time that could've gone to literally anything else.

So I wrote a script to do the boring part instead: log in to the supplier portal, download the price list, match it against the live Shopify catalog by SKU, and update only the prices that changed. A test mode shows the whole result before anything is written, and a file-driven version holds back anything that moves more than 50% for a person to check.

The part I underestimated was the audit log. Nobody asks for it until the one week a price looks wrong, and then everyone wants to know exactly what changed and why. Now every run writes a report (what updated, what didn't, what errored), so the answer is a file, not a memory.

I'm aware this makes me sound like I'm selling something. I'm not. I just really don't want to do that by hand again.

written about a script that doesn't complain