Building a Telegram briefing bot for your VA in 30 minutes (no code needed)

A morning briefing for your VA does two jobs: it tells them what happened overnight, and it tells them what matters today. Most agencies still do this with a manually-written daily message. We automated it.

Here is the 30-minute setup. No coding. $0/month.

What you end up with

Every weekday at 7am AEST (5am Manila), your VA gets a Telegram message that looks like this:

Good morning ☀️

Yesterday at [client]
• Orders: 14 ($2,840 AUD)
• Sessions: 1,212 (+8% WoW)
• Conversion: 1.16%
• Support tickets: 9 opened, 7 closed
• Returns: 2 ($148)

Overnight
• 3 new support tickets (oldest: 11 hrs)
• 1 abandoned cart at risk (24+ hrs)
• AR balance: $3,420 (2 invoices ≥21 days)

Today's priorities
1. Close yesterday's support backlog (target: <4 hr response)
2. Process the 2 returns from yesterday
3. Chase the 21-day overdue invoice (Acme Corp, $890)

Have a great day 🙌

Five sections, scannable in 30 seconds. Your VA opens Telegram, reads the brief, knows exactly what to start with.

You can also forward it to your own Telegram on the same trigger.

The stack

• Telegram (free). One bot, one chat between you, your VA, and the bot.
• Make.com (free tier: 1,000 ops/month). The trigger and the data orchestration.
• Shopify Admin API (free). The order, session, and inventory data.
• Klaviyo API (free). Email metrics if you want them.
• Xero API (free). AR balance if you want it.

Alternatives we have used and like:

• n8n (self-hosted, free) — more powerful, slightly more setup.
• Zapier (free tier: 100 zaps/month) — easier UI than Make, but the free tier is tight.

30-minute build

Step 1 — Create the Telegram bot (5 min)

1. In Telegram, search for @BotFather and start a chat.
2. Send /newbot.
3. Name it [YourBusiness] Morning Brief.
4. Username: yourbiz_brief_bot (must end in _bot).
5. BotFather gives you an HTTP token. Save it.
6. Create a Telegram group called [YourBusiness] Briefings.
7. Add the bot to the group.
8. Send a test message in the group from your own account.
9. Visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_TOKEN>/getUpdates in a browser. Find the chat.id — it’ll be a negative number for groups. Save that.

Step 2 — Make.com scenario (15 min)

1. Sign up at make.com (free).
2. Create a new scenario.
3. Trigger module: Schedule → every day at 21:00 UTC (7am AEST). Weekdays only.
4. Module 2: Shopify → Make an API call. Endpoint: /admin/api/2024-01/orders.json?created_at_min={yesterday}&created_at_max={today}&status=any. Map the date variables using Make’s date functions.
5. Module 3: Aggregator → count + sum the orders into a summary object.
6. Module 4 (optional): Klaviyo → Get metric aggregate for the previous day’s sessions metric.
7. Module 5 (optional): Xero → List Invoices filtered by status=AUTHORISED, due-date earlier than today.
8. Module 6: Text aggregator. Build the briefing using the templates and inserted variables.
9. Module 7: Telegram Bot → Send a Text Message. Bot token: the one from Step 1. Chat ID: the one from Step 1. Text: the output of Module 6. Parse mode: Markdown so the bold and lists render.

Step 3 — Test + ship (10 min)

1. Click Run once in Make.
2. Check your Telegram group. The briefing should land.
3. If it looks off, adjust the text aggregator template and re-run.
4. Once it looks right, toggle the scenario to On.
5. Adjust timing to 21:00 UTC (which is 07:00 AEST in winter, 06:00 AEDT in summer). If you want fixed Melbourne time across the year, use a daylight-savings-aware cron service instead.

What to include vs leave out

The framework we use: each line of the briefing has to answer “so what does my VA do differently because of this?”

Worth including:

• Order count and revenue (sets the day’s expectations)
• Overnight support tickets (the queue they will work first)
• AR balance + overdue invoices (chase priorities)
• 3 priorities for the day (the only opinionated section, which you write into the template and your VA adjusts as needed)

Not worth including:

• Detailed conversion funnels (too noisy for a morning glance)
• Vanity social metrics (irrelevant to the day’s work)
• Forecasts (your VA does not action forecasts)
• “Holiday X is in 6 weeks” (calendar work, not briefing work)

Five sections, six lines per section maximum. If you cannot scan the whole thing in 30 seconds standing in a kitchen, it is too long.

What we forward to you

The same briefing also gets sent to your personal Telegram in a separate one-on-one chat with the bot. That way you start your day knowing what your VA is starting their day with. Cuts a lot of “what’s the status of…” messages.

If you do not want noise on your personal Telegram, configure the bot to send your version at 8am AEST instead of 7am, and only on days where there’s something abnormal (a flagged threshold breach, an unhappy customer, an AR balance change). Make handles this with a simple filter module.

Why no n8n or Claude Code

For this specific task, n8n is overkill and Claude Code is too manual for a scheduled daily job. Make.com is the sweet spot:

• Scheduled trigger built in
• Shopify, Klaviyo, Xero, Telegram modules pre-built
• Templating language that handles dates
• Free tier covers daily briefings comfortably

If you need to scale to dozens of briefings, multiple clients, or complex branching logic, n8n self-hosted is the right next step. We use n8n for the Lead Gen Empire portfolio briefings; we use Make for individual VA placements.

What this changes

Before this bot: VA spent 15-20 minutes every morning checking 4-5 dashboards to figure out what to work on. We tracked that to roughly 75 minutes a week.

After this bot: VA spends 30 seconds reading the briefing. The 75 minutes a week reclaimed becomes either bonus hours for the client or a small productivity uplift back to the VA.

The bigger effect: your VA hits the ground running. Customer support backlog gets attacked first, not at 10am after dashboard-trawling. That single change improves first-response time by 60-90 minutes on most placements.

What’s next

For more AI-augmented workflows that pair with this brief, see Shopify automation for VAs — 12 tasks.

For the broader AI productivity layer, see How we run our VA team on Claude Code.

If you want a placement that comes with this briefing already running, book a discovery call.