You should not be relying on them for everyday tasks, or even "every year" tasks, because you're just opening yourself up to problems.
This is just what you should be using them for. As you say, you can get them ratified, check into the source code revision system of your choice or whatever in order to have a repeatable set of operations on which you can rely. For rarely performed operations this is even more important than daily ones.
Effectively you are then doing software development, whether you're a tiny one-man operation or a huge multi-national, and the same standards as you'd expect a software developer to use should apply - testing, verification, dummy-runs, early bail-outs, stop on every error, etc.
Yes. Why would you fly by the seat of your pants doing operations manually when you have this option?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
