Why this workflow
Every office has a spreadsheet like this one. A vendor invoice tracker that five people touch, with "Pending" and "pending" and "Done" all living in the same status column, a yellow cell nobody can explain, and notes that say "ask R." The usual reaction is to buy software. But the software inherits the confusion, because the rules were never written down. They live in one person's head, and she's about to be out for six weeks.
Genesis, a project manager at Zelifcam, shows a different first step. Before replacing anything, get the process out of Rosa's head and onto paper. ChatGPT runs the interview, one question at a time, then writes the process, then plays the new hire to find what's still missing. The rules end up back in the spreadsheet as a status dropdown, approval notes and a How to Use tab.
What it replaces
- Asking someone to "write up the process" and getting five bullet points
- Buying AP software to fix a problem that software can't see
- Monday morning cleanup that only one person knows how to do
The four steps
1. Find the person who actually runs it. Not the owner on paper. The one who fixes it every week.
2. Let the AI interview them. Prompt it to ask one question at a time. Batch questions get batch answers. In the demo, this is where the $2,500 finance-director rule surfaced, and two invoices in the sheet were already over it with no sign-off.
3. Have it write the process, then play the new hire. Ask it to read its own draft as a new employee and list where it would get stuck. Every "ask R" in the old notes shows up here as an unanswered question.
4. Put it where the team works. Status definitions become a dropdown. Approval thresholds go in the notes. The full process goes on a tab in the same file.
Caveats
- The tracker in the video is sample data. Check your company's rules before pasting real vendor or payment data into any AI tool.
- The interview is only as good as the person answering. Do it with the actual Rosa, not someone's memory of what she does.
- Statuses like "Done" and "Approved" sounded similar but meant different things. Expect the interview to surface more of these than you planned for.
- The demo uses ChatGPT. Claude or Gemini handle the same prompts with no changes.