Automations ⚙️

Every business has little jobs that get done the same way, over and over: someone gets a welcome message, a manager gets pinged when a big invoice comes in, a salesperson gets a reminder to call back. Automations lets TSync handle those jobs for you, so nobody has to remember them.

The idea is simple. You build a little recipe that says:

When this happens, do that.

For example: when a new lead comes in, send the sales team a notification. Or: when an invoice goes overdue, email the customer a reminder. You set it up once, and TSync runs it on its own from then on — day and night, without anyone clicking a thing.

What you can build

An automation (we call it a workflow) is a chain of simple blocks you drag onto a canvas and connect with arrows. There are three kinds of block:

• A trigger — the thing that starts the workflow. "A new lead is added." "An invoice becomes overdue." "Every morning at 9am." A workflow always begins with exactly one trigger.
• A condition (optional) — a question that splits the path. "Is the invoice bigger than €10,000?" If yes, go one way; if no, go another.
• An action — the thing TSync does. Send a notification, send an email, wait a while, create a task, ask someone to approve something, and more.

You can keep it as short as trigger → action, or build longer chains with conditions, branches and pauses. Most useful workflows are just a handful of blocks.

Turn it on

Open Setup → Modules, find Automations, and click Activate. A new Automations entry appears in the left-hand menu, with a Dashboard, a Workflows list, a History view and Settings.

One important thing: automations run on a background schedule, so the scheduled task ("cron") must be set up for timed workflows and reminders to fire on time. If it isn't already, follow Set up the cron job — it's a one-time step.

Build your first automation, step by step

Let's create a real one together: when a new lead arrives, notify the sales team. It takes about two minutes.

1. Open the builder. Go to Automations → Workflows and click New workflow. Give it a clear name, like "Notify sales on new lead". You land on a blank canvas.
2. Add the trigger. From the blocks on the left, drag New lead onto the canvas. This is what kicks things off — every time a lead is created, this workflow wakes up.
3. Add the action. Drag a Notify staff block onto the canvas, then draw an arrow from the trigger to it.
4. Say who to notify. Click the Notify staff block. A settings panel opens on the right. Pick the people or the role (for example Sales) who should hear about it, and type the message. You can drop the lead's own details straight into the text — more on that just below.
5. Save. Press Ctrl + S (or click Save). Your workflow is now live.

That's it. The next time a lead comes in, the chosen people get a notification inside TSync — a little badge on the bell icon at the top of the screen. No outside tools, no extra setup.

When you create a workflow you also choose its visibility: Private (the default — only you can see and edit it) or Global (everyone with access can see it). You set this with the "Private workflow" checkbox in the new-workflow window, alongside the name, an optional category, and a short description.

Want to try it without waiting for a real lead? Use the Test workflow button. It runs the workflow once with sample data and changes nothing real, so you can confirm it behaves the way you expect.

Your list of workflows

Automations → Workflows is where all your automations live. Each row shows the name, who owns it, its category, when it was created, and an on/off switch.

• Turn one on or off with the switch in the Enabled column — no need to open it. A workflow that's off simply never runs until you switch it back on.
• Open one by clicking its name. You land on its detail page (more below).
• Find the one you want with the filters at the top: pick one or more categories, or narrow by a created-between date range.
• Act on several at once. Tick the boxes on the left (or Select all), then use the toolbar to Enable, Disable or Delete the lot, or Export your selection to CSV, Excel or PDF. You can also export all your visible workflows from the same menu. (You'll only ever change workflows you're allowed to — anything you can't touch is quietly skipped.)

A closer look at one workflow

Clicking a workflow's name opens its detail page, which has two tabs:

• Workflow — a read-only picture of the recipe. Click Builder to jump into the editor and make changes.
• History logs — every step this particular workflow has run, with the date, the block, what it was working on, and whether each step succeeded or failed. This is the fastest way to answer "did my automation actually run, and what did it do?"

Putting your own data into messages

When a workflow runs, it knows the details of whatever set it off — the lead's name, the invoice total, the customer's email. You can slot those straight into any text box using double curly braces:

New lead: {{trigger.name}} ({{trigger.email}})

When the workflow runs, TSync swaps {{trigger.name}} for the real name and {{trigger.email}} for the real email. You can also tidy up values as you go — for example round a number or change a date format — but for everyday use, just dropping in the field is all you need.

The building blocks you'll reach for

Things that start a workflow (triggers)

• Something happens in TSync — a lead, invoice, estimate, contract, task, project, payment, purchase order, stock movement or production order is created or changes status. These are the bread and butter.
• A contract becomes signed — pick Contracts and the Signed case. It fires whichever way the signature arrived: the customer accepted it in the portal, or a colleague pressed Mark as signed for one signed on paper. Both count as signed in business terms, so the workflow starts once, not twice, when both happen to the same contract. If a contract is un-marked and later marked again, it fires again — the state genuinely changed a second time, and every transition is written into the contract's own history so you can tell a first signature from a correction. There is a ready-made "Contract signed → note in the file" template in the Marketplace to start from.
• A scheduled time — run on a repeating clock. Choose repeat every day, week or month (and the hour, weekday or day-of-month it should fire), or set a custom schedule. Great for daily digests and reminders.
• A signal from another tool — another system can poke TSync through a secure web address to kick off a workflow. Your administrator sets this up when you need it.
• A message on a channel — when Omnichannel is on, a workflow can start the moment somebody writes to you on WhatsApp, Viber, Messenger or Instagram, when a channel creates a lead, or when somebody opts out. A chat that isn't a lead yet counts too — chats are kept as plain conversations until someone qualifies them, and the trigger carries the message text, the sender, the channel and any phone or e-mail they volunteered, so your conditions have something real to test.

Things a workflow can do (actions)

• Notify staff — a notification inside TSync, on the bell icon. Pick one person, several people, or a whole role. No outside service needed.
• Send an email — to a customer, a colleague, anyone. Use a template or write it inline.
• Wait — pause for a set time (minutes, hours or days) before the next step. You can ask it to only count working hours if you like.
• Ask for approval — pause and email someone a link with Approve and Reject buttons. When they decide, the workflow picks up where it left off and carries on down the matching path.
• Create something — a task, a lead, an invoice, an estimate, a production order or a purchase order.
• Branch — send the workflow down different paths depending on a value (for example, treat VIP customers differently from everyone else), or run a couple of paths at once.
• Change a status or assign a task or project to someone.
• Answer or qualify a conversation — Send channel message and Send channel template reply on the customer's own channel (WhatsApp, Viber, Messenger, Instagram); Qualify chat → create lead turns a conversation into a real lead. Leave Only unqualified conversations switched on, so a rule never touches a chat a colleague has already picked up.
• Note something for the record — write an entry that shows up in the workflow's own history, handy for keeping an audit trail.

When the flow has to find its own records

The triggers above start a flow for one particular record: this lead, this invoice. But "A scheduled moment" brings nothing with it — it fires at the appointed time and that is all. A flow that runs every morning therefore has to find its own work.

That is what this pair of blocks is for, and they are always used together:

Without the first one, a recurring rule over contracts simply cannot exist: the obligation can be created the moment the contract is made, but nothing could ever come back a week later and check whether anything happened.

The filters are not fixed — they are fields you fill in. On Find contracts: contract types (empty = all), unsigned only, older than N days (3 by default), only those without an open task, skipping ones whose end date has passed, and a cap on results (50 by default). On For each contract: which task to create, who it goes to, how many days until it is due, and who gets notified.

Example: nobody forgets the signature again

1. Trigger: a scheduled moment, every day at 09:00.
2. Find contracts: unsigned only · older than 3 days · without an open task.
3. For each contract: create a task for whoever drew the contract up, due in 2 days.

From tomorrow, every contract left unsigned produces a task for the person who made it — and only one, because the "without an open task" filter stops counting it the next day.

Searching for a text inside the contract — and its trap

Find contracts can also search a piece of text in the contract body, so you can find contracts that are missing a required annex. The text it looks for by default is the title of the data-processing annex.

⚠️ If you rename that annex's title in the contract template, you must change the search text here too. Otherwise the rule does not fail — it reports zero results, which looks exactly like "everything is fine". It is the one place in automations where a change made somewhere else silently stops a rule.

Why it searches the text and not the annex list: the annex list knows how many annexes a contract has, their number and their date — but not what each one IS. A data-processing annex is indistinguishable there from a pricing one. The title inside the contract body is the only thing that says what it is about.

More examples to learn from

Email a reminder when an invoice goes overdue

• Trigger: Invoice becomes overdue
• Action: Send email to the customer — "Invoice {{trigger.number}} is now overdue. Please arrange payment."

Get a manager's sign-off on big invoices

• Trigger: New invoice
• Condition: Invoice total is over 10,000
• Action: Ask for approval — emails the manager a link; the workflow waits for their decision before going further

Send a daily summary of overdue invoices

• Trigger: Every day at 9:00
• Action: Notify the finance team with the day's overdue list

Welcome every new lead

• Trigger: New lead
• Action: Send a friendly welcome email, then create a follow-up task for the salesperson

Turn a serious WhatsApp enquiry into a lead by itself

• Trigger: A message arrives on a channel
• Condition: the message mentions a quote or a price
• Action: Qualify chat → create lead (only unqualified conversations), then notify the sales team

For the simple case — "someone writes 'price', send them the price list" — you don't need a workflow at all. Omnichannel → Keyword replies does that on its own; see Omnichannel. Build a workflow when the answer depends on more than the words in the message.

A faster way to start: the Marketplace

You don't have to build everything from scratch. Open Automations → Marketplace for a gallery of ready-made workflows — welcome a new lead, chase overdue invoices, react to a signed contract, route an approval, and more. Click Apply and the workflow is copied into your account, switched off, so you can look it over and tweak it before turning it on.

The same page has an Import JSON button: if a colleague exported a workflow (see Share between sites below), drop the file here to bring it in as a new, switched-off workflow you can review and enable.

Reusable actions of your own (Custom Actions)

Sometimes you do the same thing in lots of workflows — post to one specific chat channel, call one particular web address, log a particular note. Automations → Custom Actions lets an administrator define those once, give them a friendly name and icon, and they then appear as a ready-to-use block in every workflow's editor — no copy-pasting settings each time. Each custom action is built on one of a small set of safe building blocks (an in-app notification, a web request, or a log entry), so there's no code to write. This page is admin-only.

Helpful things while you build

• The canvas is visual. Drag blocks, connect them with arrows, and click any block to edit it in the panel on the right.
• Tidy up automatically. Click Arrange (or press Ctrl + Alt + L) to line everything up neatly.
• Take a guided tour. First time on the canvas? Click Tour in the top corner for a quick walkthrough.
• Every save is remembered. TSync keeps a snapshot each time you save, so you can compare versions or roll back if a change didn't work out — open Versions.
• See exactly what happened. After a workflow runs, you can replay it on the canvas: blocks that ran light up green, anything that failed turns red, and steps that were skipped are dimmed. Perfect for understanding why something did or didn't happen.
• Share between sites. Any workflow can be exported to a file and imported on another TSync install.

Keeping an eye on things

The Automations → Dashboard is your home base. It shows how many workflows ran, a 7-day trend, your busiest workflows, and any recent failures — with a link straight to the one that needs attention. A quick weekly glance here keeps everything running smoothly.

The History log

For the full step-by-step record across all workflows, open Automations → History. Every line is one step a workflow ran: the date and time, which workflow, the block, what record it was working on, and the result. Filter by workflow or by a date range to zero in on a particular run. (An administrator can also Clear logs here to tidy up old entries.) If you only care about one workflow, the same information sits on that workflow's own History logs tab.

Settings: categories, task templates and access

Automations → Settings (for administrators) has three tabs:

• Categories — the labels you use to group workflows (Sales, Finance, Production…). Add, rename or remove them here; they're what the category filter on the workflows list uses.
• Task templates — pre-written tasks (subject, description, dates, assignee…). When a workflow's Create task action uses one of these, every task it makes comes out consistent, without re-typing.
• Permissions — who may see and manage workflows. You can grant access to all workflows or only a person's own private ones, and separately control creating, editing, deleting, viewing the history, and changing these settings.

Tips for good automations

• Name workflows clearly and group them by area (Sales, Finance, Production) so they're easy to find later.
• Test before you trust. The Test workflow button runs with sample data and touches nothing real.
• Keep them readable. If a workflow grows past a dozen-or-so blocks, it gets hard to follow — split it into smaller ones.
• Check the dashboard now and then. A workflow that keeps failing is usually pointing at something worth fixing.

If something isn't working

The IL lead-management pack (ready-made templates)

The Marketplace includes a pack of 22 ready-made templates (coded IL) for a disciplined sales process — first-contact SLA, stage follow-ups, task control, load-based distribution, vacations and new-manager rules. They appear under the categories IL Sales Process and IL Operations.

A few you'll likely start with:

• IL-001 — New lead, contact in 1 hour: the safe starter. A new lead gets a 1-hour contact task, a note and a notification. Turn this on first.
• IL-008 — Offer follow-up: after an offer, calls at 1 hour, 24 hours and 3 days — and it stops on its own once the lead moves on.
• IL-014 — Cards without tasks: a daily sweep that finds active leads with no open task and creates one.
• IL-002 / IL-016 — Distribution: reassign or assign leads to the lightest-loaded manager.

How to use them: open Marketplace, pick an IL template, click Apply. Like every marketplace workflow it is created switched off — review it, map the roles and pipeline to your own setup on IL Configuration (see below), test it with a sample lead, then enable it. Start with IL-001, then add the others one at a time.

IL Configuration — set the pack up in one place

Some IL templates expect a few custom fields on the lead (a meeting date, a loss reason, a problem category, and so on) and they refer to generic roles (Sales, Presale, Team Lead, Operations) and a presale pipeline that may be named differently on your install. Rather than edit each template, use the setup console.

Open Automations → IL Configuration (/admin/workflow_automation/il_config, admin-only). It does two things:

• Creates the custom fields the templates need — it checks which of the IL lead fields already exist and creates the missing ones with one click (Create all missing, or one at a time). A field that already exists is never duplicated.
• Maps roles and the pipeline to your install — match the generic labels Sales / Presale / Team Lead / Operations to your own real role names, and point the presale pipeline at your funnel. The templates then resolve those names automatically, so they work without editing a single template. (Leave a mapping blank and the literal name is used, so a fresh install keeps working too.)

Do this before you enable the IL templates that rely on those fields and roles. Nothing runs until you switch a template on, so you can apply them all and set them up at your own pace.

See also

• PBX Connector — turn phone calls into automatic actions (a missed call can kick off a callback task)
• Set up the cron job — needed for timed and background workflows
• Getting started with TSync — back to the basics