How Heaps Normal cut credit approvals from 5 days to 2

The full story

A finance team doing help desk work

Heaps Normal sells non-alcoholic beer to stores and bars. Its finance team looks after the money side of that: bills going out, orders being filled, invoices coming in from suppliers.

Much of it ran through one shared accounts inbox, handled like tickets. Damien describes the problem plainly: "No one was quite sure who was owning this, who was taking it to the end." His team are finance people, not help desk staff, and buying a tool like Zendesk was never going to happen.

“We should be directing the work. The work shouldn't be directing us.”

Worried about the terminal

Damien wanted to use AI. He was also wary of it. "Could I possibly just inadvertently delete the whole history of our database?" Exposing customer data was the other fear.

That is why he came to us: "I wanted to venture into this AI world, but needed to have the comfort that I had experts and support available."

Start with something small that matters

Together we picked the first build on purpose. In Damien's words, it had to be "not something that was hammering us every day, but still something important enough that if I solved it, it delivered some value."

That was the new customer credit application. Heaps Normal doesn't get ten a day, but each one matters. The old version was a public Jotform link that, in his words, "didn't represent our brand."

We helped him start with Claude: the old form as a PDF, plus the Heaps Normal website for the brand's look. "Almost in one shot, you know, it just spits it back and it's like magic." In his words, "that first result back was the hook."

From one form to an ops hub

Over about two weeks of part-time work together, "an hour here or there", the page went live on the Heaps Normal site. Now when an application comes in, the system pulls the customer's external credit score, applies the company's credit policy and posts the result to the team's Slack: who applied, their score, and an approve or deny recommendation with the reasoning. A person still makes the call.

The mean time from application to approval fell from 40.5 hours to 15.2. Damien puts it as 5 days down to 2 for the customer, and the time left is people doing manual checks or talking to the salesperson. A second automation, added in October, took the handling time from 63 minutes to 30. He is clear the hours aren't the point at this volume. The gain is speed and control.

The same base now runs what the team calls the ops hub: sales and insights dashboards, customer credit checks and the new application forms.

“Don't build the elephant, build the bite.”

What changed

“The biggest thing it's done has changed my lens on what's possible.”

Before, a job like the credit application meant an old form, a shared inbox and someone watching for it. Now Damien can spend 20 minutes with someone on his team and, 40 minutes later, ship something that takes the job off them completely.

His method has changed with it. He builds version one in Excel, where the team is comfortable, and checks the formulas. Then he works on it with Claude inside Excel, and moves it into code and into the ops hub.

His advice to a friend thinking about working with us:

“This is not a vendor lock-in type relationship. This is an acceleration relationship.”