Does someone on your team lose a day or two building the sales report every week or month?
That was the starting point at Mokobara, the premium travel brand. Pulling sales across all their stores, checking returns, reconciling the numbers and emailing each manager took 1 to 2 days every cycle, with 8+ hours of that spent just reconciling.
I built them an automation on Make.com (http://Make.com) a few months ago. It has run on its own ever since, weekly and monthly:
Make pulls every sales record from BigQuery, 100K to 250K per cycle. That is too many for one request, so it reads them page by page and stitches them back together.
It calculates the numbers the team actually uses: net sales per store after returns and discounts, return rates and the change against the last period.
It builds a CSV with the full breakdown and a short email summary you can read in 60 seconds.
It reads a Google Sheet of store representatives and emails every one of them the report for their own store.
The result: the reporting problem is gone. The report went from 1 to 2 days of manual work to fully automatic, and the 8+ hours of reconciliation dropped to zero.
Two things I would do the same way again:
Calculate "net sales" in the automation, not in the warehouse. The business rule for what counts as a net sale is not what the raw data stores.
Send people their slice, not the whole report. One report for everyone gets skimmed by everyone.
The figures in the image are placeholders, the real ones stay with the client.
What report is your team still building by hand? Tell me where the data lives and I will tell you how I would automate it.
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Is your Contra discovery score stuck? Mine went from top 45% to top 20% in 13 days, and posting more is not what moved it. And i need real Project On Contra😅
I log my score on every tag with a small script that reads all 48 options on the discovery page, so this is what actually changed between 27 August and 9 September 2026, and what did not.
What moved it:
Case studies. From 0 passing Contra's quality check to 15. Contra's checklist is short: a custom cover, a clear descriptive title, an engaging description, in-depth content and real media. My first two projects failed it, one on the description and one on the media.
Services. From 1 passing service to 9, each with its own cover, a descriptive title, a rate and a real summary. Every tag a service carries gets the lift, so tag the tools you actually used.
Profile quality, 66% to 100% after the profile rewrite.
Replying to the first inquiry quickly. Response time was blank until then. It now reads 2 hours.
The result: Overall top 45% to top 20%. Automation Engineer top 25% to top 10%. Make top 35% to top 20%.
What did not move it: the four days after. From 9 to 13 September every tag gained exactly 1 point. Nothing new on the profile, nothing moves.
And the three biggest levers on my board are still at zero: earnings, reviews and verified projects. All three come from the same move, one paid project routed through Contra, so that is where my next week goes.
One thing if you compare yourself with others: Contra's point scale changed between my runs, so compare your rank band (top X%) rather than the raw points.
What moved yours? If yours is stuck, reply with your score and the tag, and I will tell you which lever I would pull first.
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What does "Make.com certified" actually mean when you are hiring an automation expert? It depends entirely on which rung of the ladder the badge is, and most buyers never ask.
Make certifies individuals on a five-level ladder. Levels 1 to 3 are the Academy badges you see on most marketplace profiles: Foundation, Basic, Intermediate. Level 4 is Advanced. Level 5 is the top: scenario architecture, error handling, data transformation, API integration and performance optimisation, assessed by Make itself. A "partner" badge is a different thing again, an agency listing, not an individual skill certification. So two profiles can both say "Make certified" while sitting four rungs apart.
Here is a check I ran on 31 August 2026, the way a buyer would. I searched Contra for "make.com automation expert" and read the first 50 profiles returned. One profile carried Make's Level 5 certification. It happens to be mine, held since 2024, recertified 2026, alongside Zapier Certified Expert status, which around 180 people worldwide hold as of 2026. I am not the biggest seller here and plenty of profiles have more reviews. But "who holds the platform's highest individual certification" has a very short answer list, and you can rerun that search yourself today.
How to use this when you hire anyone, including me:
1. Ask which level the Make badge is, one to five. If the answer is a partner logo or a screenshot, ask again.
2. Verify at the source, 30 seconds: Make and Zapier both publish public directories. A real credential is findable on the platform's own site, not just on the resume.
3. Weigh the ladder against reviews. Reviews measure how a seller ran past projects. Certification measures what the platform verified they can build. You want both, but never accept one dressed up as the other.
The full breakdown of every badge I hold, with the directory links to check them, is in the credentials project on my profile.
Which badge do you weigh more when hiring, the platform's certification or the marketplace's review count?
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From my first Zap to Make.com (http://Make.com) Level 5: six years of building automation that runs businesses
I started six years ago with the smallest kind of automation: a form response landing in a sheet, an invoice that sent itself, a Zap that saved someone ten minutes a day. Client by client on freelance marketplaces, those ten-minute fixes turned into a company, Nex Automations, and into 1,200+ automations running in production today for 210+ clients across 12+ countries.
Somewhere along the way I learned what automation actually is. It is not robots replacing people. It is the invoice cycle of a US transport company dropping from 30 days to 7, a 77% cut, because the paperwork now moves itself. It is a lead reaching the right salesperson in under 2 seconds instead of sitting in an inbox overnight. It is an operations team getting 15 to 20 hours back every week for the work that actually needs a human.
The tools shape the work. Zapier is where most businesses should start, fast to build and hard to break for simple links between apps. Make.com (http://Make.com) is where the serious systems live, visual scenarios with routing, iterators and real error handling. Self-hosted n8n is where I put AI agents when the data cannot leave the client's server. Knowing all three means the problem picks the tool, not the other way around.
Along the way Make certified me at Level 5, the top of their ladder, and Nex Automations became an official Silver Partner, listed in both directories:
make.com/en/partners-directory/nexautomations
zapier.com/partnerdirectory/partner/nex-automations
Every build still ships the way the first one should have: error handling, logging, alerting and documentation, because an automation only counts if it holds at 2 AM.
Happy to answer any Make or Zapier questions in the comments.🚀
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