Helping Tanners Hatch hostel get ready to re-open

We’ve been hard at work helping Tanners Hatch a cottage in National Trust’s beautiful Polesden Lacey Estate with some bespoke work for their eagerly anticipated Re-Opening!

Anyone wanting to stay in the Surrey countryside need look no further.

Welcome to Tanners Hatch Independent Hostel

What we actually did

To be specific about the “bespoke work”: we didn’t build their website. We automated the procurement of the inventory needed to fit out the hostel for its re-opening.

Tanners Hatch is an independent, volunteer-run hostel hidden in woodland on the National Trust’s Polesden Lacey Estate in the Surrey Hills. Re-opening a building like that means choosing and costing a long list of items for every room, and the people approving the spend need clear, comparable figures.

That was slow, repetitive work, so we built a repeatable workflow around it:

1. Someone adds a product link to the fit-out spreadsheet.
2. Our tooling reads the product page and fills in the rest of that row.
3. It captures a dated screenshot showing the price including VAT, the price excluding VAT where the shop shows it, and the delivery cost.
4. Those screenshots go into a catalogue document that can be sent to whoever is approving the purchase.

The delivery cost is the awkward part, because it often only appears after entering a postcode or reaching the basket. Automating that, rather than screenshotting product pages, meant the figures in the final document were the real ones.

Once it was working, we could run it across dozens of items, covering every room in the building, in a single session.

Need something similar?

If your business has a repetitive process that eats hours, such as price comparisons, ordering, quotes or reporting, it’s often a good candidate for a small custom tool. Read what kind of website or tool a small business needs, or get in touch.

Also posted on LinkedIn →