Workflow Automation Overview
Workflows automate repetitive work by responding to events in your account. When a trigger fires and any conditions are met, the workflow executes a sequence of actions. ISO Mate workflows support eight trigger sources, over 30 action types, branching and loops, AI steps, and a visual editor with guided placeholders.
Creating a Workflow
- Navigate to Workflows in the sidebar.
- Click Add.
- Enter a workflow name and description.
- Choose a trigger source (Entity, Schedule, Time Relative, Inactivity, Manual, Webhook, or Form Submission) and configure its fields.
- Optionally add trigger conditions that must be true for the workflow to execute.
- Add actions on the canvas. Use branch, for-each, or call-subworkflow to compose complex logic.
- Save the workflow (new workflows are created disabled so you can review before enabling).
- Use the Enabled toggle to activate the workflow.
Trigger Sources at a Glance
- Entity: fires on created, updated, or deleted events for any supported entity. Pair with field-changed to react to specific transitions.
- Schedule: runs on a cron schedule. Minimum cadence is every 5 minutes.
- Time Relative: fires N minutes, hours, or days before or after a datetime field on matching records.
- Inactivity: fires when a record has not been updated for a configured duration. Minimum threshold when expressed in minutes is 15 minutes.
- Manual: exposes a Run workflow button on issue, ticket, task, lead, deal, opportunity, and contact detail pages.
- Webhook: runs when an external system posts to a signed, rotatable URL.
- Form Submission: runs when a published form is submitted.
For detail on each source, see Workflow Triggers.
Actions at a Glance
Actions are grouped by purpose: record operations (create, update, set field, tag, assignee, archive, delete, transition status), notifications (email, in-app), helpdesk (create ticket, assign SLA, escalate, canned response, internal note), calendar and activity, external integrations (HTTP, generate PDF), AI steps (summarize, classify, draft response), and control flow (branch, for-each, wait, call sub-workflow). See Workflow Actions for the full catalog.
Placeholders and Filters
Any string field in an action config can reference dynamic data through placeholders like {{trigger.field}}, {{steps.<step_name>.output.<key>}}, or {{loop.item}}. Apply filters such as upper, date:'Y-m-d', truncate:100, json, and join:', ' to shape the output. The guided expression builder walks you through composing these without memorising the syntax. See The Workflow Expression Builder.
Templates
The template gallery provides pre-built starting points for common automations (classify inbound ticket, overdue task reminder, weekly digest, policy acknowledgement, and many more). Templates instantiate with their full action tree, schedule, trigger configuration, mailbox bindings, rate limits, alerting thresholds, and custom object bindings intact. See Starting from a Workflow Template.
Governance and Safety
- Versioning: every change is captured as a version. Restore a prior version in one click.
- Audit log: see who changed what on a workflow.
- Dry run: execute against a real or synthetic entity with no side effects.
- Metrics: track success rate, execution count, and average duration per workflow.
- Import and export: move workflows between accounts as portable JSON.
See Managing Workflows for details.
Permissions and Feature Flags
Permissions cover view, create, update, delete, run manually, import and export, template management, metrics access, and version management. Feature flags gate each advanced capability (field-changed, scheduled, inactivity, webhook, form submission, wait, branch, for-each, sub-workflow, AI actions, dry run, versions, templates, metrics, import and export) so accounts can adopt features gradually.
Execution History
Every run is logged with timestamps, status, and per-action output. Open any execution to view the full trace, including retry attempts and input/output payloads for each action.