An AI Solution that has saved me hours

12/13/2025

Since the release of ChatGPT 3, we've seen an insane boom in AI and AI usage. Everyone, literally everyone, is using some form of it. However, from the conversations I have regarding AI, it seems like most people just use it as a glorified search engine. Which is insane because, quite frankly, it is insanely powerful—but most people only use it like it's Google. How much time does this really save them? Surely there must be aspects of our daily lives where we can fit these tools in to save a significant chunk of time.

Personally, my AI usage is predominantly for software development. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned at the rate coding agents are improving, being a software developer myself. But at this current stage, it’s made me stupidly more productive and saved me tons of time. However, if I ignore software, my AI usage, like with most people, consists of using it like a search engine… but this all changed yesterday.

Backstory:

My father has been running a business for about 20 years now. He’s been thriving, using almost no sort of modern technology. No website, no ads, no CRMs, no management systems—nothing. He communicates with all his clients through WhatsApp (which I guess does count as modern tech, but you get my point) and records everything business-related with a pen and paper. His business is quite successful, so I never really had any reason to push him to adopt newer methods, but his old-school way of working did directly affect me for the following reason.

At the end of every month, he needs to get paid, which means he needs to send an invoice to all of his clients. The problem is, with no sort of online management system, the only recordings of the services a client consumed are from his notebook and timesheets. This means that, at the end of every month, I need to sit with him and type out every single invoice for that month and then send them off. This process probably takes about six hours across the whole weekend.

It was only yesterday, while I was typing away, that it struck me to use AI to help me.

The Solution:

My solution was simple: get ChatGPT to read the notes from my father’s notebook and timesheets and then convert them into some sort of standardized format. If ChatGPT could do that, then I could very easily (with my software expertise) create a PDF with the details about the services, potentially saving me five or six hours.

Step 1 – Verify that ChatGPT could read the notes

The first thing I had to do was verify that ChatGPT could indeed read and interpret the notes and timesheets. This was quite straightforward; all I did was attach an image to ChatGPT and ask it to read out the details—which it did a very good job at.

Step 2 – Prompt Generation

This next step I found quite dystopian. I got ChatGPT to generate a prompt that I could feed to ChatGPT. I wanted it to give me a prompt that I could use later so that it would produce a list of notes from the image in a standardized format.

The goal here is to produce an invoice to send to clients. The invoice usually takes up the following structure:

If I could get it to give me the list of client services in the following format:

{
Client Name:
Service Date:
Service Details:
Extras:
Price:
}

Then I could really easily create PDFs.

It gave me a great, detailed prompt, which I then tested in another session with the notes:

The prompt worked really well, and I was getting the data consistently and correctly. It even added properties that I hadn’t asked for, like a confidence score, which was a rating between 0.0 and 1.0 showing how confident the AI was in what it read for a certain note. At this point, I knew this solution would work.

Step 3 – Application Development

To be honest, this step wasn’t really necessary, given that this was a tool I would be using for myself. I didn’t really need to make a web app, but I did it anyway, because AI makes it so easy now.

I told the AI my idea and started getting it to build my application step by step:

1. I got it to build me a dashboard first that would let me upload documents

2. I then asked it to send the photos to ChatGPT and use the prompt I generated from the second step to read the data from the notes. This data would then get sent back to my application, where I could use it to display the data nicely.

3. With all the invoice data available to me, I got the AI to add a button which would then use the data to create a PDF using a pre-defined invoice template, and voila, here is the result:

Summary:

I tested the application out by uploading the notes from the previous month and then converting them to a PDF. Within 15 minutes, I was able to produce the same invoices I did the month before, which took me about five hours.

I can now confidently say AI is helping me save five to six hours per month, which might not seem like that big of a deal to you, but to me, it means a lot. Sitting down for two hours at a time and repeatedly entering more or less the same thing was one of the WORST things ever.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to encourage you to look at pain points in your life that AI could help you out with. AI is here and it's here to stay, so we might as well make the most out of it.