What is a flow?
One trigger, the stages items rest in, and the automation each stage carries.
01A flow is one kind of work, in a line
A flow is a rail of stages, in the order work travels them. Each stage carries at most one piece of automation — the trigger, action or control that brings work into it — and a stage with nothing assigned is simply where work waits. Everything that happens to your business lands as an item travelling one of these rails — a booking, an order, an enrolment, a request, a timesheet week. There is no flow type: what a flow collects is decided by what its trigger names, and a flow with nothing attached is a first-class internal process.
02One trigger, five ways in
Every flow carries exactly one trigger, chosen from five. A submission arrives — someone sends a form this flow names, or a timesheet week. A purchase arrives — someone pays for one of this flow’s offerings. On a schedule — a date, or every week or month, which is what makes an internal process with no form and no offering possible. Something happens to this work — a fact about an item already on a board, like a payment failing or an invoice going overdue. Something is added to a basket — actions only, minting no card, because a basket is not yet work. A published offering or form is claimed by at most one flow — the attach list in the trigger stage’s Automation shows everything published, and anything another flow already holds says so by name.
03Stages
Stages are the columns work rests in — between one and ten of them, and one column is a legitimate board. A stage can be terminal, and a terminal stage states its outcome: completed or cancelled. Moving an item out of a terminal stage reopens it — the redo loop. A stage can also carry its own checklist, edited on the stage in the flow editor; ticking those boxes is progress on every item resting there.
04Actions and controls
Actions do one thing as work enters their stage: Notify (inbox, email or both), Request payment, Request a form from the customer, Generate a document from a media template, Request a signature, Ask for a review, Assign a member, Create an item in another flow, or Send to a connected integration. Controls route and gate: Condition branches on a fact the trigger publishes, Approval parks the run until a person decides, Wait delays for a duration or until a date the work carries. A control’s other outcome — failed, declined, otherwise — can jump the item to any stage you name, which is how a rail branches and loops.
05Progress
Every item carries a progress bar, and the flow chooses how it is read: By stage (automatic, from how far along the graph the item sits), By tasks (the ticked boxes of the stage’s checklist), or Manual (the ± steppers on the item itself).