Well hello there!
Happy Labor Day Weekend to you all. I hope you are having a lovely and restful break.
I know my dad always aimed to detach and rest over these long weekends, as hard as he would try, it was difficult for him to stop thinking about the store. Maybe it was a tricky customer. Maybe it was a struggling new hire. He tried to focus on what he could learn from each of these situations, but they still ate up his most valuable asset, his time. He often daydreamed over how fantastic it would be if he had a member of staff who was available 24/7, who never tired and who could answer any store-related questions for him. Cue that cinematic Disney music when the magic appears…
📌 At a Glance
What Dooey is: a staff member with a perfect memory. It knows your customers, products and numbers, and it knows Rundoo inside out.
It reads two things: our how-to manual (the Rundocs) and your own store’s live data.
It works like a ladder, three rungs: Analyze (ask it a question) → Act (have it do the task) → Automate (set it and forget it).
It’s already open to your whole team, scoped to each person’s permissions.
A Dooey mini-series is starting - short videos to get you going, or to show you tricks you didn’t know it had.
🪄 The Magic of Dooey
This week I want to talk about the part of Rundoo I think is genuinely a little magical: Dooey, our AI assistant.
“In the last 6–12 months it’s been the single most beloved feature of Rundoo.” - Nick Hershey, Co-founder & CEO of Rundoo
And I’m not just saying that because I work here. I promise I can back this up with facts and quotes from Rundoo clients.
The owners who use Dooey every day? They love us for it, they have seen the time and money, saved by using it daily. However, we have heard from some of you that using Dooey feels unnatural. And honestly, I get it. AI can feel like a lot, or like something that is not really meant for you, or your store. I’m not going to spend this week’s primer trying to convince you on using Dooey, but I am going to show you what it is, and how real stores are using it day to day. If, after seeing how other stores are using Dooey, you start to use it more, then I will be thrilled. Or, similarly, if after reading this your interest is piqued and you want to chat a bit more and brainstorm ways this could work for you - book time on my calendar and we can chat!
🧠 What is Dooey?
Think of Dooey as a tireless staff member with a fantastic memory. Someone who knows every customer, product and number in your store, and also understands everything about how to use Rundoo. It never calls in sick and never gets tired of pulling a report.
“I like to think of AI as just another employee that’s working 24/7… throughout the year it saves hours, and that’s just a free employee that’s available to us. I love it. I use it every day.”
- George Acevedo, Golden State Paints
In practical terms, Dooey draws on two things:
Our how-to manual (the Rundocs). We’ve written up how everything in Rundoo works. What every feature does, how to create a customer, how to set permissions, what each term means. Ask Dooey “How do I create a new customer?” and it reads through all of it and hands you back a short, step-by-step answer.
Your own store’s data. Ask it the questions you’d normally take to your bookkeeper or accountant. “Which customers stopped buying this year? What lost me margin last month?” Dooey gets you the answers in a couple of minutes instead of having to wait a couple of days pulling the information .
Why does this matter?
It cuts out the middleman. The answers that used to mean a phone call, a report request, or a week of waiting are now a few clicks of the keyboard away (or a few words with your app).
🔔 One new thing to note
Dooey is now available for everyone on your team, and it respects their permissions. So if someone’s set up for the point of sale but not for admin or reporting, Dooey helps them with point-of-sale things and stays out of the rest.
📱How are Rundoo Clients using Dooey?
We sort what people ask Dooey into three rungs of the ladder - Analyze, Act, Automate. Generally clients get comfortable at that first rung before moving on. And look, you do not have to be a modern store or be tech savvy to use this. Just ask your questions exactly as you would a staff member. Start by asking. Move to doing when you’re asking the same thing twice. Automate only what you already trust.
Rung 1 - 🔍 Analyze: just ask it a question
This is a great place to start. With nearly full adoption across all Rundoo clients (98% asked Dooey a question last month).
“What are my top sellers this month?”
“Which customers have big balances they just paid off?”
“What’s low on inventory that I should reorder?”
“How do I add a custom price to a product?”
You ask, Dooey answers. And this is not just about getting an answer fast - there are real cost-saving benefits using Dooey too.
“I sold that $5,000 worth of merchandise at cost… until AI came out, I didn’t catch it. But as soon as AI jumped in there the first day, it showed up: hey, you have a low margin. My new policy today is to check out Rundoo AI every day.”
- Jason Soderquist, owner
Rung 2 - 🛠️ Act: have it do the task for you
Once you get comfortable asking Dooey questions, now comes the fun part. You can get it to do the prep work for you. It can draft a purchase order, update records, create the custom price for a product.
Dooey also does this in tandem with you. So you don’t have to fear that it will go off the rails and make decisions that you don’t agree with. It will mention the outliers to you, or the unexpected issues it encountered and wait for your go-ahead before making changes.
Clients have mentioned their favorite things to prep are:
Drafting a purchase order from what’s running low.
Making bulk changes to items - renaming or even creating new items in one go instead of one at a time.
Previewing a discount across a whole multi-line order before you commit it.
Rung 3 - ⏱️ Automate: set it and forget it
For a moment I want you to consider a task that you repeat. Maybe you complete this task monthly, or weekly, or even daily. As you think of this task, I want you to try to imagine what you would do if you could take back that time. That is the beauty of automation, you can set up a repeatable job once and then spend your time doing something else.
The most-loved version of this is the Daily AI Summary - a short read that lands on your phone each morning with your top sellers, low stock, big orders, and anything unusual overnight. This is often where store owners notice something that is off.
This is also where people have noted the time saving, with an array of examples across Rundoo clients:
Drake’s Paint runs a Benjamin Moore ordering agent every night at 2 AM - the draft order is waiting for approval the next morning.
Others automate cycle counts, or an automatic nudge to customers with aging balances.
One owner even has a Dooey send a customized scheduled daily health update on the business automatically.
Custom weekly reports review (with some stores noting that this has cut review time down from 6-8 hours to under one).
And routines can do so much more than that: scheduled reports, reorder drafts, cycle-count nudges. Have you ever thought about the time you would save if an order list wrote itself? Well you are in luck, because the purchase-order automations in Dooey are quick and easy, and yet fewer than 25 ran across all of last month! Try it out and see how much time (and maybe even heartache) it could save you.
🧰 Try it yourself - automate a task you’ve already done a few times, so you know exactly what “right” looks like before Dooey does it for you.
📺 The Dooey mini-series is starting
In addition to this primer we’re kicking off a Dooey mini-series. This is a module made up of short, snackable videos to get you excited about using Dooey daily (excitement is optional, although I think it will come naturally!) And if you are already a Dooey advocate, hopefully we can show you a few things you didn’t know Dooey could do. I’ll drop new videos into the Primer as they land, and they’ll live in Rundoo University too. Our first one is out this week, linked below.
Resources
Getting started with Dooey: Video 1 - Ask Dooey first
📇 Printable glance card can be found here
🗺️ A printable walkthrough guide can be found here
🎥 Video demo can be seen here
Looking for ideas of some powerful capabilities?
Quick start guide to Dooey is here
↔️ Two-way street
Dooey is the feature owners tell us they love most — and it got that good because you kept telling us what you needed from it. So if there’s a question you wish it would answer, or a task you wish it would just handle, tell me. That’s how it gets built. And if you’re one of the roughly 1 in 5 who gets the daily summary but hasn’t actually asked Dooey a question yet, this is your week - reply to this email and I’ll get you your first question to ask.
🤝 Just the Beginning
A favorite phrase of mine is “Every day’s a school day,” and with Dooey this is absolutely true. You can use it for routine jobs/tasks but also, as Rundoo evolves and as your stores gather more and more historical data, Dooey’s ability to help increases.
I would love to hear from you - how do you use Dooey everyday? Is there anything you wish you could do with Dooey that you can’t, or haven’t yet? If you have an idea or a request, add it here 💡 so that we can start mulling it over and continue making Rundoo work for you.
Talk soon,
Dee