Operations review · Integration · Automation

Find the hours your team loses to manual work and broken processes. Get them back.

We map how work moves through your business, put a cost on every manual step, then connect your systems and automate the work. Fixed price, fixed date, and results measured in hours and dollars.

Book a free scoping call See the results

30+ years connecting business systems
Fixed price, fixed date
Your code and data, no lock-in

Built for operating businesses where the manual work grows faster than the revenue.

Distributors, manufacturers, contractors and service firms running on a mix of ERP, accounts and spreadsheets.

“We type the same data into three systems.”

Orders, jobs and invoices re-keyed between your ERP, accounts, CRM and spreadsheets, with errors to chase afterwards.

“Month-end takes a week.”

Reconciliations, approvals and reports built by hand, often by the most senior (and most expensive) people in the business.

“We can’t grow without hiring more admin.”

Every new customer, site or product line adds manual handling, so headcount grows with revenue instead of margin.

How we work: Find, Connect, Automate, Prove.

Every engagement starts with Find. Some clients stop after Connect; most go on to automate.

Find
We map how work actually moves through the business: who touches what, where data is re-keyed, and where the hours go. Every bottleneck gets a cost.
Connect
We get the data right: linking systems that should share it, tidying what’s inside them, or designing a new system properly from day one.
Automate
We remove the manual handling, using rules for the routine work and AI only where judgement is needed, with a person reviewing where it matters.
Prove
We measure hours saved against the baseline from the Find stage, so you see the return in hours and dollars, not just a new system.

Two ways to start.

Either way, you’ll know the cost and the expected return before any build starts.

Scoping call

You’ve found the problem. We’ll cost the fix.

For when the issue is already clear: a manual job, a broken process, or systems that don’t share data. We walk through it with you, design the fix, and send a fixed-price, fixed-date quote for the build.

Free, with no obligation to go ahead.

Recommended

Operations Review

Not sure where the hours go? We’ll find them.

We work through how the business runs with the people who do the work, map your systems and processes, and put a cost on every bottleneck. You get a plain-English report with each fix scoped, priced and ranked by return.

Our guarantee: if the savings we find don’t outweigh the fee, you pay nothing.

What we build.

Every build is quoted from the review or scoping call, at a fixed price and a fixed date.

Integration

Connect your ERP, accounts, CRM, store and spreadsheets so data is entered once and flows everywhere it’s needed.

Process automation

Remove the manual handling on top: invoices raised when jobs close, orders routed to carriers, exceptions flagged for review.

ERP & finance workflows

Approvals, matching, reconciliation and month-end, on whatever ERP or accounting system you run. Thirty years in finance systems.

Data, reporting & AI

A clean, central data store with dashboards that update themselves, then AI that answers questions from your own numbers.

Fixed price and fixed date for every build phase
If we underquote, that’s our cost, not yours
Larger projects delivered in phases, each paying for itself
Documentation and team training as standard

Foundations first

Good automation starts with good data.

Automation and AI are only as reliable as the data underneath them. Whether yours is spread across several systems, tangled inside one, or about to live in something new, we get it clean and consistent before we automate anything on top. It’s where we’ve spent most of our 30 years.

Several systems: connected, so data is entered once
One system: cleaned up and structured so it can be trusted
A new system: designed from day one for reporting and automation
Monitoring and alerts, so you know if anything stops working

Where the hours usually go

The manual work an Operations Review most often finds, and removes.

Order entry

Orders from your store, email or customer portals flow straight into the ERP and on to the warehouse and carriers.

Invoice matching & approvals

Supplier invoices matched to POs automatically, with only the variances routed to an approver.

Job costing

Committed costs visible per job as they happen, not weeks later when the invoices land.

Month-end reconciliation

Bank, ledger and sub-system balances matched automatically, leaving only the exceptions to review.

Management reporting

The weekly pack pulled together from every system and sent out before anyone asks for it.

Customer enquiries

Order status, stock and account questions answered from your live data, with a person reviewing anything unusual.

Results

See all results →

Approvals screen showing a queue of receipts and the PO lines with price variances

WorkflowERP

Services business · Dynamics GP · Built in 2 weeks

Invoice price variances approved in hours, not days

Time removed: ~3 days/week
Annual return: ~$40,000/year

The problem When a supplier invoice didn’t match the purchase order price, the variance went through an email and paper-based approval process, and each approval took 4–5 days to work through the paper trail.

What we built An approvals workflow connected to the ERP. Variances outside tolerance are routed automatically to the right approver, who sees the PO lines, the variance and the invoice PDF on one screen and approves or rejects with a comment. Larger variances escalate to a manager.

The return Variances are approved within a few hours, with a full audit trail of who approved what and why. Nobody chases paper or email threads to find out where an approval is stuck.

Turnaround: 4–5 days → a few hours

Diagram of products, pricing and stock flowing from the ERP to Shopify, and orders and payments flowing back, fully reconciled

IntegrationERPAutomation

B2B & B2C engineering and construction supplies business · Dynamics GP · Shopify · Built in 6 weeks

A full-time catalogue job moved from data entry to marketing

Time removed: ~40 hrs/week
Annual return: 1 role redeployed

The problem Moving from a legacy website to Shopify, with B2B and B2C customers, thousands of products and variants, and a complex ERP pricing matrix. Shopify’s catalogue and pricing rules don’t map neatly onto ERP pricing, and keeping the website up to date took one person full time.

What we built A two-way integration between the ERP and Shopify. Products, variants, stock and customer-specific pricing flow from the ERP into Shopify catalogues; orders, customers and payments flow back, with every order traceable and reconciled between the two systems.

The return The website now updates itself from the ERP. The role that used to spend its week maintaining product data now works on marketing that grows the business.

Thousands of products and variants, priced and stocked from the ERP

Invoice processing screen showing document counts by status, a list of supplier invoices with an invalid vendor flagged, and an import log

IntegrationWorkflowERP

Manufacturing business · AU & NZ · PlusOne · Built in 4 days

Every supplier invoice accounted for, across Australia and New Zealand

Time removed: ~20 hrs/month
Annual return: ~$8,400/year

The problem Invoices from PlusOne arrived as text files over FTP, with little visibility of import or file errors. Transactions were being lost and supplier invoices missed for payment.

What we built An interface over the file exchange that checks every file and invoice for errors, logs each import, and reconciles what arrived against what was processed. Australian and New Zealand files are handled in one place, with upload and download history.

The return The real payoff is accuracy and confidence: the team trusts that every invoice that arrives is processed. Errors are caught and fixed before invoices go missing, records can be reprocessed where needed, and every step has a full audit trail.

No more lost transactions or missed invoices

Why Altara AI

Thirty years inside the systems businesses run on.

Hi, I’m Robert. I’ve spent 30+ years building and supporting finance, ERP and integration systems, so I know where the manual work hides. Modern tools and AI mean fixes that used to take months now take weeks. Experience means they’re secure, they connect to what you already have, and they still work next year.

Measured results

Every fix costed before, and measured after.

You own it

Your code, your accounts, no licence fees, no lock-in.

Your data stays yours

We’re based in New Zealand. Your data is hosted in the region you choose, in accounts you control, and never used to train AI models.

Honest advice

If the numbers don’t stack up, we’ll say so.

Where do your team’s hours go?

Book a free scoping call. We’ll tell you where to start and what it’s likely to return.

Book a free scoping call