What started as a small hobby eventually turned into a problem I couldn’t ignore.
I’ve been running an Etsy shop in the United States for over ten years. For most of that time, it was simply a creative side project. I had a full-time job, made handmade products in my spare time, and felt excited whenever an order came in.
Then life started to change.
I was in my mid-40s, raising a young child, and increasingly aware that relying on a single career forever might not be realistic. AI was advancing at an incredible pace, companies were constantly restructuring, and I felt a growing need to build another source of income.
So I decided to take my Etsy shop seriously.
Over the next year, I transformed it into a handmade jewelry business and poured evenings and weekends into growing it. To my surprise, sales increased much faster than I expected.
I should have been thrilled.
Instead, tax season arrived.
To calculate my taxes, I needed to know my net profit. That meant downloading my Etsy data for the first time.
What I found was chaos.
Orders, advertising reports, payment records, deposits, shipping costs—spreadsheet after spreadsheet filled my Downloads folder. Even as someone comfortable with Excel, I struggled to understand how everything connected.
Eventually, I turned to AI for help.
After days of trial and error, I used Excel Power Query to combine the data into a single bookkeeping system. When the final numbers appeared on my screen, I was shocked.
The revenue I thought I was making and the profit I was actually keeping were completely different.
Once I included material costs, shipping expenses, advertising spend, Etsy fees, and other business purchases, most months produced surprisingly little profit. My annual net income was nowhere near what I had imagined.
The numbers didn’t lie.
But the bigger problem wasn’t the profit.
It was the process.
Every month I would have to download new files, reconnect data, update reports, and repeat the same complicated workflow all over again. Worse, I had built most of it through conversations with AI, and I wasn’t even sure I could remember every step the next time.
That’s when I realized something important.
Excel was helping me understand the past.
What I really wanted was visibility into the present.
How much had I sold today?
How much had I spent on advertising?
How much profit was I actually making right now?
As a full-time working mom, my time is limited. Between work, family, creating products, and running a business, every hour matters.
Ironically, the more my business grew, the more time I spent managing data instead of growing the business itself.
One evening, after another late-night session staring at spreadsheets, I found myself asking a simple question:
How long can I keep doing this?
That question changed everything.
It was the moment I realized that even a one-person business needs systems, not just hard work.
And it was the question that eventually led me to build my own ERP system—simply by talking to AI.
What Is an ERP?
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software is typically used by large companies to manage inventory, sales, finances, and operations in one place.
