Booking projects one month ahead
Hi, I'm Aishu.
At a NZ$5.4B freight forwarder, I was the person people called when systems wouldn't talk to each other. I took 98% of shipments to zero‑touch and saved its shippers $2.3M a year.
Now I do the same for smaller teams. I connect the tools you already pay for, automate the retyping between them, and add AI that asks a person before it acts. One distributor's finance team got 160 hours a month back.
Where the hours go
Every business has jobs where a person reads from one screen and types into another. They're slow, they cause mistakes, and nobody hired your team to do them.
An example week. Yours will look different, and that's what the 20‑min call is for.
Work
Every number below comes from my own projects. Client names are shared where I have permission; the rest are described by industry.
At Mainfreight I built the EDI and API integrations between the forwarder and its customers' visibility platforms: project44, FourKites, E2open, Flexport and Infor Nexus. Shipment processing reached 98% straight‑through, removing 1,000+ manual transactions a year. Customers included Verizon and Ecolab.
For a food distributor I automated order entry and journal postings with bots. The process ran 98% faster and accuracy rose 16%. I also automated daily exchange‑rate capture for 5 currencies and the expense workflow, cutting manual data‑entry time and cost by a further 33% and 12%.
An accounts‑receivable aging dashboard that showed the finance team which invoices to chase first, and who owed what across branches.
15+ self‑serve dashboards on one governed reporting platform across 4 regions, so people stopped emailing analysts for the same numbers.
Fixed prices
Each one has a written scope, a delivery date and a price agreed up front. The "from" price is the smallest useful version. Most teams start there and grow it once it's paying for itself.
I map where your team's hours go, rank what's worth automating, and build the first workflow in n8n.
Invoices read from email or upload, checked against rules, approved by a person, posted as bills.
Orders, fees and stock land in Xero or QuickBooks on their own, and reconcile to the payout.
Data from your ERP, Shopify or spreadsheets into one star schema that refreshes itself.
Ask questions of your own systems in Claude or ChatGPT, read‑only first, with approved actions later.
Built it with Lovable, Bolt or Cursor and it's stuck? I audit it, fix what's broken, and get it live.
EDI and API integrations, ops‑to‑finance reconciliation, CargoWise and TMS projects, or a person embedded with your team for a few months. Priced after the 20‑min call.
Talk it through →Prices in USD. Software licences stay yours and in your name. Prefer to hire through Upwork? The same offers are there.
How it works
You show me the job that eats the most hours. I tell you honestly whether it's worth automating, and roughly what it would take.
Free · this week
A written scope, a price and a date. I build the smallest version that gives hours back, and you see it working on your real data.
Usually 5–12 days
A short runbook, tests, alerts when something fails, and a named person who approves anything that matters. You own all of it.
Then monthly care, optional
My one rule for AI: it drafts, a person decides. Every value it pulls shows where it came from, and nothing gets filed, paid or sent without a named approver.
About
I'm Aishwarya Murali. Most of my career sits where operations, customers' systems and finance meet. I was Head of Business Intelligence & Customer Solutions at Mainfreight, a NZ$5.4B global freight forwarder. I also built payments reporting for Citi, used by 100+ people across 5 regions. I'm CargoWise certified.
In 2026 I built and shipped a multi‑tenant SaaS product on my own, with billing, scheduling and WhatsApp messaging, using AI coding agents. That's how I work now: AI does the heavy lifting, and I do the parts that need judgement.
HoursBack HQ is me, working directly with you. No account managers and no hand‑offs to someone junior.
— AishuQuestions
That's most of my career. If there's an export, an inbox, an EDI feed or a database, there's a way in. If there truly isn't, I'll tell you on the first call rather than after you've paid.
It can, which is why it never acts alone. AI drafts, plain‑code rules check its work, and a named person approves before anything is filed or paid. Every value shows the page and line it came from.
You do. It runs in your accounts, under your licences, with a runbook so another developer could pick it up. I don't hold anything hostage.
Whatever fits what you already run. Often that's n8n, Python, Claude, Power BI and the APIs of Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Shopify or your TMS. I won't add a subscription you don't need.
I work on US Central time (Chicago) and take calls 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. Most of the build work happens without meetings, so teams in other time zones work fine too.
You show me one job that eats hours. I ask how often it happens, what systems it touches and who checks it. You leave with a straight answer on whether it's worth automating, and a rough price if it is.
Twenty minutes, no slides. Bring the job your team dreads most and we'll work out whether it's worth automating.
Prefer email? hello@hoursbackhq.com