← All free guides

Free guide Everyday life · 8 min read ·

Let AI Do Your Admin: 5 Scheduled Setups (With Guardrails)

5 recurring business admin jobs Claude can run on a schedule: enquiries, unpaid invoices, subscriptions, renewals and the week ahead. It drafts, you send.

By Indi (Indiana Julian) · AI consultant for small businesses, certified OBM® and council-funded AI programme teacher

Short answer: the business admin that suits AI best is the admin that comes back on a rhythm: enquiries nobody has replied to, invoices nobody has chased, subscriptions quietly renewing, deadlines creeping up, and a week you haven’t looked at yet. Connect Gmail and Google Calendar, write one prompt per job, run each by hand until you trust it, then put it on a schedule. The guardrail that matters most: let it read, sort and draft, and keep sending, paying and cancelling for yourself. Scheduled tasks need a paid plan (Claude Pro is around £20 a month). On the free plan the same prompts work with a calendar reminder to run them.

The time isn’t in the one-off asks. It’s in the jobs that come back every week and get done late, because nobody’s job is to remember them.

I run my own business admin on scheduled Claude agents. My inbox agent works through my email 3 times a day and drafts replies it never sends. A morning brief lands at 9am. Before that, I spent 6+ years as an OBM building these back-end systems for founders, and the rule was always the same: automate the noticing and the drafting, keep a human on anything that leaves the building.

Set up once (15 minutes)

  1. Connect Gmail and Google Calendar. Settings → Connectors, click the + in the header, find each one, sign in and approve. On the desktop app, quit and reopen if a new connector doesn’t show.
  2. Check the approval setting. Once Gmail is connected, Claude can send, reply and forward, not only read. Go into the connector’s settings, check it asks you before sending, and leave that on.
  3. Make a Project called “admin”. Paste in your payment terms, your standard prices, your email sign-off and 2 messages that sound like you. Every prompt below reads better with that context.
  4. Run each setup by hand first. A week of running it yourself shows you what it gets wrong while you’re still watching.
  5. Then schedule it. Ask in plain words: “Run this exact prompt every Monday at 8am.” Claude sets up the scheduled task and confirms.

Not on a paid plan? Put a repeating reminder in your calendar, worded as the instruction (“Invoice watch, paste the prompt”), and run it yourself. Slower, same result.

1. The enquiry watch (every weekday morning)

The admin that costs the most when it slips. An enquiry that waits 3 days has often gone somewhere else.

What it can do: read and draft. What it can’t: send.

Nick this one:

You're checking for enquiries that are waiting on me.

Search my email from the last 3 days for new enquiries, booking requests or questions from potential clients that I haven't replied to.

Give me:
1. Each one: who, what they want, how long it's been waiting.
2. The one to answer first, and why.
3. A draft reply for each, saved as a draft in Gmail, using my voice and prices from the Project. Put [CHECK] anywhere you'd be guessing a price, a date or availability.

Rules: never send anything. Ignore newsletters, receipts and existing clients' routine emails. If nothing's waiting, say so in one line.

The line that does the work: “saved as a draft”. The replies are waiting in Gmail when you open it. You read, tweak, send. The decision stays yours, the typing doesn’t.

2. The invoice watch (every Monday)

Chasing is the job everyone puts off, so let something else do the noticing.

Nick this one:

You're checking my unpaid invoices so nothing slides past its due date unnoticed.

Search my sent email for invoices from the last 90 days, and my inbox for remittances or payment confirmations against them.

Give me:
1. A table: client, invoice number, amount, due date, paid or not (and how you know).
2. Anything overdue, with how many days.
3. For each overdue one, a draft chaser saved in Gmail. 1 to 7 days overdue gets a light nudge, 8 to 20 days asks for a payment date, 21+ days states the amount and terms plainly.

Rules: never send. If you can't tell whether something's been paid, mark it "unsure", never assume. My payment terms are in the Project.

Worth knowing: email is a patchy record of who’s paid. It’s a noticing tool. Your bank or accounting software is the truth, so check there before a chaser goes out.

3. The subscription sweep (first of the month)

Software you signed up for once, for one project, still renewing. It adds up in a business faster than at home.

Nick this one:

You're finding every subscription my business pays for.

Search my email for receipts, renewal notices and payment confirmations from the last 90 days.

Give me:
1. Every subscription: name, amount, how often, next renewal date.
2. The ones I'm most likely to have forgotten, flagged, and any with a renewal in the next 14 days.
3. Then build it as a downloadable spreadsheet, one row each, sorted by annual cost.

Rules: only what's in the emails, no guessing at prices. Don't cancel, change or contact anything.

The bit that matters: sorted by annual cost. £9 a month looks like nothing. £108 a year looks like a decision.

4. The renewals and deadlines sweep (first of the month)

Domains, insurance, software contracts, tax deadlines, the certification you need to renew. The stuff that’s fine until the week it isn’t.

Nick this one:

You're my monthly deadlines sweep.

Search my email and calendar for anything with a renewal, expiry or deadline in the next 90 days: domains, hosting, insurance, software contracts, tax and filing deadlines, memberships, certifications. Also include these, which may not be in my email: [e.g. "professional indemnity renews in March, self assessment 31 January"].

Give me:
1. Urgent (next 14 days), this month, and on the radar, in date order.
2. The single next step for each urgent one.
3. Anything with an auto-renewal I might want to review first.

Rules: only what you find or I tell you, don't pad the list with generic reminders. Don't renew, pay or reply to anything.

Why it runs monthly: a quarterly sweep catches a 30-day notice period too late.

5. The week-ahead brief (Monday, before email)

Nick this one:

You're giving me the shape of my week before I open my inbox.

Read my calendar for this week and my email from the weekend.

Give me:
1. Each day in one line: fixed commitments and how full it is.
2. Every call or meeting, with a 3-line prep note from our past emails: where we left off, anything I promised, what I want out of it.
3. Anything someone is waiting on me for.
4. What I'm assuming I'll have time for that the calendar says I won't.

Rules: under 250 words, no pep talk. Don't reply to or draft anything.

The line that does the work: number 4. Your head thinks Wednesday is free. Your calendar knows about the call you accepted in a weak moment.

The guardrails

These are the rules I’d scope into any client’s system. The first one is non-negotiable in mine.

The honest bit

This is not set-and-forget, and anyone who sells you that is skipping the maintenance. Scheduled tasks can fail quietly: a connector disconnects, a login expires, your computer’s asleep. If a brief you rely on doesn’t turn up, that’s your cue to look. And the output is a first pass. It can miss an email with an odd subject line or misread who’s paid.

What you get is the noticing done on a schedule, with the drafts waiting. That’s most of the admin.

This week

Set up number 2 and run it by hand on Monday. If anything has slipped, that’s where it shows up first.

That’s five jobs on a rhythm. Built For Freedom is where the rhythm is built around your business, one small move a day for thirty days. It’s a waitlist and it opens in rounds.