How to Automate Cents

Cents tracks laundry that belongs to somebody else

Cents is business management software for the laundry trade: laundromats, dry cleaners, and the wash-dry-fold and pickup-delivery operations built on top of them. It runs the point of sale, the machines, the routes and the accounts.

What makes the trade unusual is custody. A dry cleaner or a wash-dry-fold shop is holding property it does not own. Every bag on the rack has a name, a promised day and an owner who will notice if the blouse comes back with a different button. Lose a bag and no discount fixes it.

Then there is the other half of the revenue, which most people outside the industry never see. Commercial accounts. The gym's towels. The restaurant's aprons and napkins. The salon's capes. The short-term rental operator with forty sets of sheets in rotation. Those customers do not walk in. They sign terms, get billed monthly, and are often worth more than the drop-off counter.

The wholesale side is where the paperwork lives

Retail laundry is simple to run. Someone drops off, someone picks up, the card reader takes the money.

Commercial is a different business wearing the same uniform. The hotel wants the invoice submitted through its accounts payable portal, not emailed, and will not pay until it is in there. The restaurant group's bookkeeper queries one line every month. A new account needs a certificate of insurance sent to a facilities manager who wants it uploaded rather than attached.

Meanwhile the costs move. Gas, water and power are the numbers that decide whether a laundromat makes money, and they sit on utility accounts that tell you nothing useful until the bill arrives. Detergent and poly bags come from a distributor whose prices changed in March. The dryer that keeps tripping needs a part, and the parts distributor shows stock and price behind a login.

None of that is laundry. All of it happens at a screen, usually after close.

Cents

Utility usage seen weekly Gas, water and power read off the account while a leaking valve or a dryer running long is still a small number.

Commercial invoices that land Bills filed in each customer's own payables system and followed until they are approved, rather than left to age quietly.

Customer messages wait for you Anything about a balance or a missed pickup is drafted and read by a person, because a neighbourhood shop lives on what people say about it.

Cents already handles the counter and the route

Cents automates a great deal of the trade, and a shop that has not turned it all on is doing work twice.

Commercial Invoicing sets up accounts with custom pricing and terms, sends invoices in a batch, and chases past-due balances with automated text and email follow-ups. Cents Accelerate runs automated campaigns off customer behaviour: welcome messages, Google review requests, re-engagement for people who have not been in. Cents Dispatch plans and optimises pickup and delivery routes, with geofenced service zones and automated notifications from pickup through to return delivery. Cents Assist answers the phone around the clock, shares order status and takes new orders.

That is a serious amount of automation, and it all shares one property: it runs on what Cents already knows. An order, a customer, a route, a balance.

The moment the answer is somewhere else, it stops. Cents cannot log into the hotel's payables portal to submit the invoice it just generated. It cannot read this month's usage off the utility account, or check whether the distributor still lists the part at last quarter's price. Those sit behind logins Cents has never been introduced to.

The store can watch its own costs

The parts of the business that only get looked at in a bad month can be watched every week.

This week's gas and water usage read off the utility account and set next to last week's, so a leaking valve or a machine running long shows up in days rather than on a bill in six weeks. Detergent, hangers and poly on the distributor's site, checked against your own last invoice, so a price that has gone up is named before the reorder goes out.

Invoices carried into each commercial customer's own payables system and their status followed, so the hotel that has had your invoice sitting unapproved for five weeks gets found before the quarter closes. Certificates of insurance uploaded where the facilities manager actually wants them.

The machine parts you keep replacing, checked for stock and price across two distributors. The card system's own reporting compared against the day in Cents, so a difference is a Tuesday problem rather than a year-end one.

Keep the line at the customer. Reading a portal can run unattended quite safely. Anything that texts a customer about money should be written, then read by a person, because in a neighbourhood business a wrong message about a bill gets talked about.

The fetching happens while the machines run

The utility account, the distributor, the hotel's payables site: three logins, one figure each, and all three get opened at nine at night, once the machines have stopped.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the portals your shop actually deals with, reads the figures, and puts them next to what Cents says, or files the invoice where the customer insists it goes.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything going to a customer is drafted and waits.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.