Smart Life USWork Automation & AI, Learned on the Job in the US
Spreadsheet automation, Apps Script, and AI workflows built from real operational work in the US.
Practical systems, code, and lessons learned from real warehouse and office workflows.
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New to work automation? These guides are the place to begin.
Warehouse Automation
Receiving, shipping, inventory, scanning and dashboards — automated with Google Sheets and Apps Script.
View the series →Dock Appointment System
How inbound appointments moved off phone and email into a Google Sheets system, step by step.
View the series →Apps Script in Practice
General-purpose automation code that is not tied to one system — Apps Script snippets used on the floor to cut repetitive work.
Browse the guides →Featured Automation Guides
Build a Warehouse Inventory System in Google Sheets with Apps Script
Part 1 of building a warehouse inventory system in Google Sheets: four sheets and one Apps Script sidebar that lists today's inbound containers and records putaway locations.
Read →Google Sheets dashboard with Apps Script: see warehouse status at a glance
If you’re looking for how to build a Google Sheets dashboard, this post walks through a real setup. In an actual warehouse you often end up with an inbound sheet, outbound sheet, stock summary, putaway status, and load management sheet all open at once, jumping back and forth. Before the morning meeting, you waste time just pulling numbers from each sheet in Excel and Google Sheets, and the on-site walk-through gets pushed back. This article summarizes how to build a **Google Sheets dashboard** that shows inbound, outbound, and stock on a single screen, automatically.
Read →Google Sheets inbound appointment sheet structure — basics 1
If you found this by searching for how to build an inbound appointment system in Google Sheets, you’re probably a practitioner directly handling warehouse or logistics work. You may already have inventory management or outbound automation in decent shape, but the system for managing inbound time slots is still scattered across Excel, phone calls, and messengers. This post walks through, from scratch, a Google Sheets–based inbound appointment sheet structure you can copy, paste, and start using right away.
Read →Step-by-Step Series
Google Sheets Warehouse Automation Series
Receiving through shipping, inventory, scanning, logs and dashboards — one working step at a time.
View the series →Google Sheets Dock Appointment System · Booking
Operating hours, booking windows, capacity and duplicate checks — built with Google Sheets and Apps Script.
View the series →Google Sheets Dock Appointment System · Setup
Sheet structure, settings, date handling and web app pages — the foundation the rest is built on.
View the series →Latest Articles
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Google Sheets bulk appointment booking: finish with one LockService and setValues call
When you look for ways to bulk‑register appointments in Google Sheets, you often hit this: “validation is fast enough, but actually writing to the sheet is painfully slow.” In operations like inbound appointment booking, where dozens or hundreds of rows pile up daily, you really want to paste the carrier’s list once and process everything in one go. In the previous post…
Google Sheets bulk booking validation: check everything in one paste (final)
If you’re looking for a way to bulk‑validate bookings in Google Sheets, this post lays it out. When you paste multiple bookings into a sheet, you often burn time just figuring out which row is failing and why. Especially when you paste an inbound booking list copied from Excel: one row with a bad date format can block the whole batch…
Google Sheets Late-Arrival Alert Auto Email: Inbound KPI 5
If an inbound truck is late and nobody notices, the on-site plan falls apart immediately. This post walks through how to set up Google Sheets late-arrival alert auto emails, plus an email automation that sends a summary of tomorrow’s inbound appointments in advance. With just Google Sheets and Apps Script, you can bundle late-arrival alert emails and a “tomorrow’s appointments” preview so the manager can see at a glance, from their inbox, which time slots need attention.
Google Sheets weekly KPI email: KPI Pt.4 final code
People looking for automatic weekly KPI report emails from Google Sheets are usually in a similar situation: every Monday morning, they copy last week’s inbound appointment KPI into Excel, aggregate carrier scores, and email the report around. It’s something a person can do, but too much of a waste to repeat every week…
Google Sheets KPI Auto-Rollup: Nightly Trigger History (Full Code)
Most guides on automating KPIs in Google Sheets focus only on how to calculate “today’s numbers.” In real operations, however, what matters more than today is the trend versus yesterday, last week, and last month. Manually changing the date and recalculating is tedious, and on busy days…
Google Sheets reservation KPI aggregation: on-time rate & dwell time auto-calculation
If you’re looking for a way to auto-calculate on-time rate and dwell time in Google Sheets, this post lays it out. Once you start managing inbound appointments in Google Sheets, you’ll eventually ask: “What’s the on-time arrival rate by carrier? What’s the average dwell time? Can I see it every day automatically?” This post is for operators who…
How to Auto-Refresh a Google Sheets Dashboard: Refresh Multiple Views at Once and Automate with Triggers
When you look up how to auto-refresh a Google Sheets dashboard, most guides stop at “make one function per view and attach a button.” As soon as you have three or more views—daily appointments, status overview, yard trailers—you end up with three buttons and three time triggers. The result: multiple time triggers stack on the same function, three functions run in parallel, and they keep hitting the 6‑minute Google Apps Script limit and stopping…
Google Sheets Yard Trailer Status Dashboard — Part 3 (Final)
If you’re looking for how to build a Google Sheets yard trailer status dashboard, this post walks through the setup. The inbound appointment system in this series connects reservations, check-in, and yard moves into a single flow. In the previous post - Automate Google Sheets appointment views: build a Today sheet — Dashboard Part 1…
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About Smart Life US
Smart Life US documents the Google Sheets, Excel, Apps Script and AI automation actually used while working in the US. Rather than isolated code samples, each post explains the problem on the floor, how it was automated, and what had to change once it was running.
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