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 a chain of steps run in order on arrival, 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. There is no flow type. What a flow collects is decided by what its trigger names, and a board for purely internal work is fed by hand with New item.
02One trigger, two ways in
Every flow carries exactly one trigger, chosen from two.
- Submissions
- Someone sends a form this flow names.
- Purchases
- Someone pays for one of this flow’s offerings.
03Stages
Stages are the columns work rests in, between one and ten of them, and one column is a legitimate board. The last stage in the rail is the end: an item arriving there is closed as completed, and moving it out again reopens it. Waiting is the default. A stage with no step keeps its work until a person moves it, and a step only moves work onward when its play control says so. Manual moves are never blocked. 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
A step does one thing when work arrives at its stage, then hands on to the next step in the chain. Play on the last step moves the item to the next stage on success; paused, it waits for a person. The failure route can do nothing or send the item to a stage you name.
- Actions
- Notify customer, Notify member, Request payment, Send invoice, Request a form from the customer, Generate a document from a template, Request a signature, Ask for a review, Assign a member, or Create an item in another flow.
- Condition
- Branches on a fact the flow knows, such as an amount or an answer.
- Approval
- Parks the run until a person decides, on the item’s own card at that stage.
- Admission
- Gives the customer a check-in code, then holds the run until they check themselves in or the team checks them in.
- Wait
- Delays for a duration, or until a date the work carries.
05Progress
Every item carries a progress bar, and the flow chooses how it is read: By stage (automatic, from how far along the rail the item sits), By tasks (the ticked boxes of the stage’s checklist), or Manual (the steppers on the item itself).