How to implement the assignment of numbers for outgoing letters?

Question

Automation

Good day!
I faced the following task: let's say an employee writes an official letter on behalf of the organization and on letterhead (the form is just a word document with a decorated header, company logo, etc.). the letter needs to be assigned a reference number (serial number of the letter + artist + date) and enter it in the letter itself. Now this is done quite clumsily and stupidly: there is an excel plate, the employee opens it, enters his number following the previous one, closes the plate and enters it in the letter. Further saves in PDF and sends to the addressee. When one employee did it, everything was fine, now there are a lot of employees and there is confusion. I would like to find a solution so that the number ref. the letter was assigned automatically by checking the last registered number and written somewhere (the same excel plate or database. How to implement this, where to dig.

Answer 1

No, of course you need to automate a lot of things. you just need to start with something small. Since my programming experience ends up with a few Python scripts, I'll have to learn something. So I start with individual tasks. Thanks for the direction, I'll read it.

Answer 2

Does your whole organization do nothing more than send outgoing messages?
The task is solved in an elementary way, with a mini-site on PHP + mpdf, but is it really the only task that requires automation?