I Replaced a 3-Person Data Entry Team With 200 Lines of Python

Before you get angry — they all got promoted Let me explain. A logistics company was paying 3 people to manually copy shipping data from emails into spreadsheets. 8 hours a day. Every day. The error rate was ~5%. Each error cost them $200-$500 in misrouted shipments. I wrote a Python script that: Reads incoming emails via IMAP Extracts shipping details with regex patterns Validates against their database Exports to their ERP system via API Flags anything it's not confident about for human review The 3 data entry people became the "quality assurance team" — they now review the 2% of entries the bot flags, handle exceptions, and train the system on new email formats. Result: Error rate dropped from 5% to 0.3%. Processing time from 8 hours to 12 minutes. The actual code pattern I can't share the client's code, but here's the stripped-down pattern: import imaplib import email import re import csv from datetime import datetime def connect_mail ( server , user , password ): mail = imaplib .