Python for Business Automation: Practical Tutorial

Python has become the preferred language for business automation thanks to its simplicity and powerful libraries. In this tutorial we teach you the fundamentals.

Why Python for Automation?

• Easy to learn: Clear and readable syntax
• Extensive libraries: Solutions for almost any need
• Active community: Thousands of resources and examples available
• Cross-platform: Works on Windows, Mac and Linux

Essential Libraries

For Web Automation

• Selenium: Browser control
• Requests: HTTP calls
• BeautifulSoup: HTML parsing

For Data

• Pandas: Tabular data manipulation
• OpenPyXL: Excel reading/writing
• SQLAlchemy: Databases

For Email and Notifications

• smtplib: Email sending
• python-telegram-bot: Telegram notifications

Practical Example: Automatic Report

Imagine you need to generate a daily sales report:

import pandas as pd
from datetime import datetime
import smtplib

# Read sales data
sales = pd.read_excel('sales.xlsx')

# Filter today's sales
today = datetime.today().date()
today_sales = sales[sales['date'] == today]

# Calculate metrics
total = today_sales['amount'].sum()
count = len(today_sales)

# Send report by email
report = f"Today's sales: {count} transactions for ${total:,.2f}"
send_email(report)

Best Practices

• Error handling: Always use try/except to catch errors
• Logging: Log all actions for debugging
• Environment variables: Never hardcode credentials
• Modularity: Divide code into reusable functions

Next Steps

Once you master the basics, you can explore:

• Scheduling with cron or Task Scheduler
• REST APIs for integration with other systems
• Databases for persistent storage
• Docker containers for deployment

Need Help?

At Pekka Soft we develop custom automations with Python. From simple scripts to complex data processing systems.