Automations
An automation is a rule: when this happens, do that. They exist because the follow-up that grows a business is exactly the follow-up that gets dropped during a busy week.
Professional and up (workflows). Found under
Settings → Operations → Automations.
The shape of a rule
Every automation has one trigger, the trigger’s settings, and one or more steps that run in order. Create one with New workflow, or open any automation, the built-in ones included, to change it.
| Trigger | Runs | Settings |
|---|---|---|
| Job Completed | when a job is marked complete | - |
| Invoice Overdue | once per invoice, when it is that many days past due | days overdue (empty = the day it turns overdue) |
| Invoice Status Change | when an invoice is sent, paid or part-paid (by hand or online), or a payment is refunded or reversed | from / to status (empty = any) |
| Estimate Status Change | when an estimate is sent, accepted or declined (from the portal or the signing page), or expires | from / to status (empty = any) |
| Contract Signed | when a contract is signed | - |
| Recurring Job Due | once per visit of a recurring job, before its day | days ahead (0 = on the day, 1 = the day before) |
| Scheduled | daily, weekly or monthly at a time of day | how often, the time, and the day |
Voiding or writing off an invoice does not run an Invoice Status Change automation - those are their own buttons, and they only post webhooks.
Times and days are on your business’s timezone. Invoice Overdue and Recurring Job Due automations wait out your quiet hours before they send. With the weekend hold on, a visit whose reminder day falls on the weekend gets its reminder on Friday instead.
The steps:
- Send email - a template, to the customer or to the job’s crew lead (the assignee marked leader, or the only one). The crew lead is only offered on triggers that name a job, and the email goes in the crew lead’s own language.
- Send SMS - a template, to the customer.
- Create invoice - for the completed job, with your net days. Sent the way Send now sends: issued to the books, emailed with the pay link, any deposit already paid credited. A job with nothing priced, or a customer with no email, gets a draft instead, and the run history says so.
- Create next job - books the visit after this one in the job’s recurring series, unless that visit already exists or the series has ended.
- Create job - from a signed contract.
- Send webhook - posts the trigger’s details to your endpoint as
workflow.<event>. - Update status - moves the record the trigger fired on: an estimate to Expired, or a recurring visit back to Draft. Offered only on those two triggers.
A step only appears where it can run: Create invoice needs a completed job, Create job a signed contract, and a Scheduled automation has no customer to write to, so it can only send a webhook.
Rules worth having
A few that earn their keep for most landscapers:
- Job completed → create invoice. Built in as “Auto-Invoice on Job Completion”: one step, and the invoice goes out as if you had pressed Send.
- Invoice 7 days overdue → send a reminder before it becomes an awkward phone call. The built-in “Payment Reminder” automations do exactly this at 7 and 30 days.
- Recurring job due, 1 day ahead → email the crew lead so the crew and equipment are lined up. Built in as “Notify Crew Lead on Recurring Job Due”.
- Job completed → create next job, for a series you book one visit at a time.
- Estimate accepted → post a webhook to the tool your office plans the season in.
Before you turn one on
Automations send real messages to real customers. Two habits prevent the embarrassing version:
- Test with your own email first. Make yourself the customer on a test record and watch what arrives.
- Check the settings narrow it enough. “Invoice overdue” with no days set also chases the customer you already agreed to give extra time.
Switching one on reaches what is already in scope. An overdue reminder runs for invoices that crossed its threshold in the last week (never ones overdue for months), and a Recurring Job Due automation runs for visits today and within its days ahead.
Watching what they did
Each automation keeps a run history - what fired, when, and for which record. When a customer says “why did I get three emails”, that’s where the answer is.
The once-per-thing triggers - Invoice Overdue, Recurring Job Due and Scheduled - run each automation once per invoice, per visit and per scheduled time, however often the scheduler checks.