EOS

The company had built their operations around a Glide app that was meant to centralize lead tracking, project management, budget oversight, and client communications. In theory it was the perfect tool. In practice, the person responsible for updating and managing the app was drowning.

Every piece of data, a new lead, a budget change, a project status update, had to be entered manually. As the dataset grew, the app became increasingly laggy. When a business owner needed to check a client's budget on-site or resolve a question about a job mid-conversation, they had to call the app manager. The answer could take anywhere from a couple of minutes to several hours. Clients waited, competitors called, and deals slipped away.

The core workflows that should have been instantaneous were bottlenecked by a single person manually feeding data into a system that was never designed for the scale it was reaching. The company needed a way to decouple data entry from data access, and give every decision-maker the ability to query their own business in real time.

Instead of replacing the Glide app, I built an n8n automation layer that sits between the data sources (Glide, Google Sheets, and QuickBooks) and the people who need the information. The result is a chat interface where business owners can interact with their data using natural language, no app navigation required.

When a lead comes in, the manager types the details into the chat. n8n captures the data, validates it, and writes it to the correct table in Glide and the corresponding row in Google Sheets, all in under a second. When a business owner asks "is Jon Doe on the project master list?", n8n queries the connected data sources and returns the answer in real time. When a budget needs updating, a single message triggers the full update chain across Glide, Sheets, and QuickBooks.

The automation covers the full lifecycle: lead capture, data retrieval, client approval or rejection, budget updates, and project scope changes. Each action is routed through HTTP nodes that connect to Glide's REST API, Google Sheets API, and QuickBooks Online, since there was no native Glide n8n node at the time of development.

Core Visibility Screens — The Glide app itself was rebuilt around five clear operational views that give the business owners instant visibility into their numbers:

• Sales List — Every lead, job type, and source tracked in one place, automatically populated by the n8n workflow.
• Budget Screen — Real-time job profitability pulled from QuickBooks and Sheets, updated with every budget change.
• Project Master — Live job health and cash visibility, showing exactly where each project stands.
• Monthly Margin — Clear profitability at a glance, aggregated across all active and completed jobs.
• Completed Jobs — History becomes intelligence, with past project data feeding better estimates and smarter decisions.

Cash flow is controlled through projections, inbound tracking, and non-flowing cash visibility, all surfaced through the same Glide interface and powered by the n8n backend.