No developers, no data team. Noosa Electric has AI running its weekly reporting anyway.

Andrew Maclaren runs Noosa Electric Co on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. He's not a developer. He's not a data analyst. He's got Noosa Electric's Simpro® and Xero data structured in Tugger®, connected to AI, and two hours of his Monday morning back.

Meet Noosa Electric Co

Noosa Electric Co has been looking after the Sunshine Coast for over 50 years. Electrical, air conditioning, refrigeration and appliance repair, plus solar, home batteries and energy consultancy - residential and commercial, across Noosa and beyond. More than twenty people on the team, with Andrew Maclaren as Owner and Director.

Andrew describes himself as "moderately interested in technology."

What he's actually built tells a different story.

Why he went looking

Andrew is a Simpro user, and like most business owners he'd started paying attention to AI. He wanted to know what it could realistically do for a business his size.

What he didn't want was to be locked in.

"I was all excited about what AI could do for me and how it was going to make my business better," he says. "Then came the realisation that it probably wasn't going to make my business better. It was going to make it worse - by locking me into a contract for a whole bunch of things I didn't really want or need, in return for a whole bunch of empty promises."

So he went looking for options. Tugger came up on a Simpro user forum.

"I had no clue, really. But other people were finding it useful, so I thought, let me go and explore that."

He signed up, got his data in, and started working out what he could do with it.

Two hours, every Monday

Every Monday, Andrew spent the first two hours of his working week building reports.

"I'd run through Simpro, I'd run through Xero, and I'd run a bunch of reports that would tell me what's happened in the last week. I might run those for the month, for the quarter, for the year, just to make sure I'm always on top of what's happening in my business."

He wasn't looking to stop doing it. He thinks it's important work. He just thought there had to be a better way.

There was. Andrew now has AI querying his Tugger database directly, building his reports for him.

"It pulls it together into a spreadsheet which is updated weekly, and it presents a new column for every single week. I think I've got a couple of years of history there."

Sunday night to Monday morning

Sunday night. The reporting runs on its own. AI queries Andrew's Tugger database and builds the weekly reports while he's off the clock.

Monday morning. The spreadsheet is waiting. A new column for every week, a couple of years of history behind it.

"I'm 85 to 90% of the way there in getting information out in a format similar to what I used to produce manually. And on top of that, I've built some more interesting reports that give me summaries and various other bits and pieces."

Monday one-to-ones. The reports go straight into the team meetings, showing everyone where the business is at and where the focus needs to be.

He's honest about how that feels.

"I quite like that, and I feel quite proud of myself for building that and saving myself that amount of time in my week."

Teaching Claude to prep the invoicing

The second project is bigger, and it's the one that gets to the heart of a service business.

So Andrew is building a skill in Claude that reviews the day's completed jobs and works out what needs to happen before each one can be invoiced.

It runs overnight. In the morning he gets a list of what needs doing, and a script pushes the changes back into Simpro - moving jobs from "completed" through to "AI reviewed, completed for invoice."

He's clear that it's a work in progress, and clear about why it's worth the effort.

"It's protecting my margin. It's presenting a better output to my customers. It's reducing the time my team spends on things like spell check and all the other bits I have to do for my boys on a regular basis. The output will be better, the time needed will be less, and I've got more control over it. Which I like."

Does he know how it works?

This is the bit worth pausing on, because Andrew is refreshingly blunt about it.

"I still really have no clue as to what I'm doing, to be brutally honest with you."

He does, though, understand the important part.

"You're taking my data and putting it into a standardised, structured database that's got an MCP connector I can then go and query."

That's the whole thing. Tugger doesn't just collect the data - it structures it, so the AI can work with it efficiently and accurately. Andrew doesn't need to build anything from scratch, learn a schema or write SQL. He needs a database that's ready for the question.

Ask Andrew whether this puts him ahead, and he doesn't hesitate. "Information is power. Having that information at my fingertips - I'd been doing it manually, so it's saving me time."

Then the bigger claim.

Why the structure matters

There's one more thing Andrew values, and it's the thing most people miss. His business data is now sitting in a structured database of his own, ready to be queried by whatever he points at it.

"Now I've got all of my information in a structured database like yours. I quite like the sound of that."

That's the foundation everything else is built on. The Monday reporting, the invoicing agent, the questions he hasn't thought of yet - none of it works without the data being organised first. Get that right and you've got options.

And on working with the team: "You've been very, very responsive, I must say. And Nicholas has been great."

Andrew isn't a developer. He runs a twenty-plus person electrical business on the Sunshine Coast and he's got AI running his weekly reporting and prepping his invoicing. He didn't wait to understand it all first. He got his data structured, plugged in a connector, and started asking questions.

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