Case study
From fifty-nine gaps to twenty-four data points
Pedigree dog breeding kennel · The case that isn’t about SEO, but about saving someone three hours every week
Not all projects undertaken by a digital consultancy end up as a Search Console graph. Some result in someone no longer wasting a whole morning every time they sell a puppy.
The client is a Spanish kennel specialising in a rare breed of pointing dog, recognised by the Royal Canine Society. Each sale generates six documents — contract, terms and conditions, invoice, details sheet, handover form, follow-up form — and each of these documents had fields to be filled in by hand. Fifty-nine fields in total. Broken down as follows: seventeen in the first, twelve in the second, three in the third, nine fields in the fourth, nine in the fifth and nine in the sixth.
Today, twenty-four pieces of data are typed in just once, and the programme automatically fills in the remaining sixteen fields: the full name, the second payment, the amount in words, the taxable amount, VAT, the file code, the file names and the dates written in both text and words.
Let’s begin:
59 → 24
records entered per sale
12 → 2
Office launches per batch
83% → 100%
batches completed without error
30 / 30
documents verified without error
1. The starting point: a letterhead that was a photograph
Before automating anything, we had to sort out the source material. The kennel’s corporate letterhead wasn’t a logo that could simply be placed in the template: it was a JPEG measuring 1.700 × 2.200 pixels at 200 dots per inch, with all the text rasterised. Identical in Word and Excel, same hash, impossible to edit as text. Let me explain 🙂 there were no letters on that letterhead, just pixels shaped like letters.
Embedded within that image were three errors that were printed on every document leaving the kennel:
- The company name was misspelt: it was written with incorrect spacing and a wrong particle
- An email address that no longer existed: ‘contacto@’ instead of ‘info@’.
- And a font that wasn’t the brand’s: the document’s ‘Normal’ style was set to Calibri, not Century Gothic.
These were corrected by moving pixels within the image itself and redrawing only what was essential — the word ‘info’, a hyphen and a comma — whilst reusing thirty of the thirty-two characters from the original company name so as not to alter the stroke.
The size of the logo was also adjusted, and in this case the measurements prevented an error. The original measured 302 × 304 pixels with the tagline at 2,79 millimetres in x-height. It was tested at 50 per cent and 25 per cent scale; at 25 per cent, the tagline dropped to 0,70 millimetres, below the legibility threshold for print, which is around 1,2. It was finalised at 62,5 per cent—189 × 190 pixels—with the tagline at 1,75 millimetres. It is legible and takes up the space it should.
2. What we did: a desktop application, not a spreadsheet with macros
A kennel doesn’t need a business management system: it needs six documents to be produced correctly first time round. That’s why the solution wasn’t a spreadsheet full of macros, but a Windows programme that reads an Excel file and generates the six sales documents for each puppy, plus their PDFs. It was delivered in four parts: the operational template with twenty-five columns and eighty rows, a seven-sheet development specification, the source code, and a 28 MB portable package with the Python interpreter embedded, so that it works without installing anything.
And then came the part that really matters: the round of testing on the kennel’s actual computer, with its own version of Office installed and its own folder paths. Eight defects were found. All eight were corrected based on a specific case sent by the client: an error log, a screenshot or the file itself that had failed.
3. The results
| What was measured | Before | After | How it was verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data to be entered per sale | 59 fields | 24 data points | Count across the 6 documents |
| Office launches (6 instances) | 6 Word + 6 Excel | 1 Word + 1 Excel | Simulator implementing DispatchEx |
| Documents per batch | 60 out of 72 steps (83%) | Batch complete | 36 documents + 36 PDFs |
| Correct test files | - | 30 out of 30 | 5 cases × 6 documents |
| Tokens not replaced | - | 0 | Field-by-field review |
| Invoice for €100 | €99,99 | €100,00 | 7 totals to the nearest cent |
| Long Word paths | 2 failed documents | 42 out of 42 correct | Folder containing 249 characters |
| Legibility of the claim | 0,70 mm (25% proof) | 1,75 mm (final, 62,5%) | Threshold: 1,2 mm |
The seven totals verified to the nearest cent were 250, 300, 300, 500, 250, 100.000 and 100 €. The error on the invoice stemmed from a legacy cell that calculated VAT as base × 0,21 without rounding: the internal total was 299,9953, although 300,00 was printed on screen.
It was also verified that importing from .xls and from .xlsx produces documents that are identical text-for-text, and this resolved a long-standing question: Microsoft Excel does retain the letterhead when converting the invoice to .xls; LibreOffice does not — it reduced the file size to 9,7 KB from 140.
4. Why we’re sharing this case
Because it describes something you don’t see on a dashboard: the day-to-day friction of running a small business. Six documents per puppy, six times launching Word, six times launching Excel, fifty-nine fields to fill in without making a mistake, and an invoice that, due to a rounding error hidden in a cell, charged one cent less each time.
None of that appears in an SEO audit. And yet it’s exactly the sort of problem that can be measured, fixed and verified.
It’s clear that a digital consultancy doesn’t make a living from this. I’d advise you, nonetheless, to be wary of anyone who only knows how to step in where there’s a nice graph waiting at the end.
To sum up: where is your friction?
Basically, in the work your team repeats every week without complaint, because ‘that’s how it’s always been done’. That’s where you need to look.
Here are three suggestions. Firstly, count exactly how many pieces of data are entered twice in your most common process: if there are more than twenty, you’ve got a project on your hands. Secondly, check the calculations carried over from your templates before relying on them, because that missing cent has been missing for years. And thirdly, never accept a ‘process success’ report as proof that the process worked: ask for the files and open them.
Remember, at the end of the day, it’s all about giving back the time to whoever was wasting it 😉
