Ask HN: What is something you automated paid off?

I took a lot of manual labor out of managing a VRBO with zapier and a few other things.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.garble.org&#x2F;automating-your-vrbo-rental-with-zapier-and-smart-things-part-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.garble.org&#x2F;automating-your-vrbo-rental-with-zap...</a>

i used to work on a payment system and i automated test data generation, you can specify constraints about an an entity you want in your test and the software will generate all the possible instances for that entity.<p>Do you want a credit card ? then you get instances for all banks, products, limits, end of the month cycle ...<p>what used to take my colleagues a week to do, was now being done in 15 minutes.

I automated some reports at work that would take 8-12 hours to make and the program produces them in 3 minutes.