BOA Automation Suite

The Problem

Berlin Opera Academy ran its entire administrative function manually. Four staff members spent their days writing offer letters, tracking payments, sending confirmation and reminder emails, reconciling PayPal transactions, and managing cancellations. The work was almost entirely repetitive and rule-based: the kind of work that shouldn't require a human to sit down and do it every day.

The overhead was approximately €148,000 per year in administrative salaries for processes that followed the same logic every time.

The Decision to Automate

I was working at BOA in an operational role when I started noticing patterns. Every student went through the same lifecycle: application, offer, payment, confirmation, follow-up, and (sometimes) cancellation. Each step had clear triggers, clear rules, and clear outputs. There was no ambiguity, just volume.

I proposed building an automation suite and taught myself Google Apps Script from scratch to do it. The organization used Google Workspace for everything, so building on that ecosystem meant zero additional infrastructure cost and no migration required.

Technical Approach

The system is built entirely in Google Apps Script, using Google Sheets as the operational database and Gmail for all communications.

What it automates:

• Offer letter writing:Populates template documents with student data and sends them automatically when an application is approved
• Payment tracking:Monitors PayPal transactions via their API and matches them to expected payments in the student records
• Confirmation and reminder emails:Triggered automatically based on payment status and timeline rules
• Cancellation handling:Detects missed payment deadlines and initiates the cancellation workflow with appropriate notifications
• Payment reconciliation:Cross-references PayPal records with internal tracking, flags discrepancies, and triggers automated follow-up emails for outstanding balances

Google Sheets serves as both the data layer and the admin interface. Staff can see the current state of every student, and the automation writes back to the same sheets. No separate dashboard needed.

Results

• Two part-time administrators now handle what previously required four full-time staff — approximately €74,000 in annual savings
• Payment reconciliation system with automated follow-ups achieved an 18% increase in payment collection
• Zero additional infrastructure cost, built entirely on existing Google Workspace tools
• Also built the production website: 95/100 Lighthouse score, top-3 organic rankings on key search terms, 8% organic traffic increase through technical SEO