FLOWs + Automations : Common Use Cases & Explanations

[Music] hello and welcome everyone this is Mike I'm the founder and CEO of SuiteDash welcome to Academy sessions these sessions are designed to help you by learning directly from experts in our community who have hands-on experience with SuiteDash what makes these sessions special is that they are hosted by SuiteDash experts from our community we've given these experts free reign to develop these presentations based on their actual experiences helping SuiteDash customers just like you and this allows for a truly authentic and practical learning experience each expert brings their own presentation style and perspective and that's what makes Academy sessions so valuable we've entrusted the host to shape the content in a way

That best addresses the common questions and challenges our customers face every day and this approach ensures that the information is not only practical but also deeply connected to real world use cases today we're excited to have Coach Kathy stefen leading our session Kathy has a wealth of knowledge and a unique approach that we believe you'll find both insightful and highly relatable we're grateful to Cathy for sharing her expertise and we hope you enjoy the session and find it as useful and engaging as we do be sure to subscribe to SuiteDash on YouTube and follow us on all other social media channels to stay up to date on new features announcements and promotions okay that's my intro let's get on with the session

Kathy you there yeah I'm here okay well I think you need no introduction you go ahead and start whenever you are ready and I'm standing by okay okay sounds good so this is a part two of um what we started a couple weeks ago and this is adding automations to flows I it did come out of uh some of the coaching calls I've been doing with people who will like they need to set up their staff automations so that's where the content come came from So today we're going to look specifically if I can get my thing what are automations so automations are triggered actions that are automatically done by your portal to get a certain result now I found a fun little video here that

Says this is your trigger the automations are all these things that happen automatically and they do it in order to get some sort of a result so that is a typical automation now your portal does something similar it doesn't make you breakfast but it does a lot of other things flow automations are actions that are triggered by a flow step or um having the whole flow being completed so that's how flow automations work and you can apply the automations we're building today you can actually put pretty much anywhere in the portal where you have the option to create an automation so we're we're just specifically looking at some in the flow area

Be careful I talk a lot about squirrels SuiteDash is so full of things you can go chase and time you can waste um you want to really know what you're doing and kind of have it mapped out before you start playing with automations or you'll go get lost and lose two or three days um playing around because there's some really cool stuff that SuiteDash can do so in order to avoid these squirrels for every automation that you think about you want to go what why sorry why what how and when so why how will this enhance relationships will it save time will it add value will it ease your workload will it improve quality somehow what you're serving up will it direct them

Or will it remind you a lot of um automations can be any of those things and more but those are kind of the ones I came up with what you do want to write down what you want to have happen like I said you can go get lost in Squirrel territory really quickly if you don't map out what you want now then you go how so you decide what the trigger will be today we're looking at the how is the flow either a flow step or a completing of the flow and you do um I like to pre-build my pieces so that when I am building out a flow and the automations they're all just there I just go grab them instead of having to pause halfway through and go build something so pre-building is really helpful and then WIS you have to kind of think

Through your process when do I want this automation to happen in in this uh workflow that you've decid decided on so if you were here last time we built a staff onboarding workflow using a flow um we are going to work off of the on demand one today because it's already in the portal and and they they both you can do exactly the same either of them um but today we're going to just do the on demand one so it's going to be a bit slower today because some of the things I have pre-built some of them I haven't so you can see how to pre-build some of these things but we're going to look at some staff flow examples and staff is a little bit trickier in that it doesn't have as many options as a contact does

So there's a we can talk about the differences uh if you have questions um definitely put your questions in the chat as we go along and I will pause and Mike can answer if I don't know the answer to certain things and if I'm going too fast let help me slow down okay the first thing and I'm totally pulling a lot of these out of the air um because I actually don't have staff but sometimes you want a reminder so a reminder to the supervisor of a staff is something I came up with um why so if you're having we're doing a staff on boarding so this new staff feels welcome the person the big wig new to come and say hi or whatever so there's a why there of a relationship you want to a reminder to the internal staff um

To stop by and say say hello to this new recruit and we're just going to email the internal person so this we're going to have attached to flow step number one so that the person has actually in the office they've started the process and the supervisor will just get an email to to go say hi so we're going to go over here and we're going to open up our portal we're going to go over to the flows uh if I can remember what I'm doing there's our flows and I'm going to I have it I have it built out on a different portal here so I'm going to just have that hidden over here and I'm going to go find my flow on that side as well so I can copy

And paste so we're going to use the on demand form today or flow we're going to build this one out okay so first thing we want to do um is flow step one so this is a flow step and every step you can configure automations so you just hit configure automations I'm just pulling over my cheat sheet over here and we're going to email internal that means I'm going to email someone inside the portal company or the company's portal however you want to say that so you have to choose who's going to get it so in my case I'm going to send this message to me

And they're going to get an email new staff started today and you can put whatever you want in there hey so and so somebody started here's your information whatever um so whatever email you want to send them you can send them and that's get attached to the step one so when Step One is complete this email get shot gets shot off to that internal person okay that is the first one okay everybody's so dang quiet so they okay yeah no questions yet just to say that uh so through yes as you as

You said that there are places where you can set up automations all throughout the platform and this is just an example of that the official word that we use is uh and it's not very welln so I just kind of want to put it out there we call them opportunities so uh wherever there's a place where you see that button that says add automations we like to call those opportunities so we do as much as we can to find places in the in the in the platform where we can place quote opportunities and those opportunities are places where you can configure automations to be triggered based on a some completion action in that part of the platform that's it okay okay so that you saw the email to welcome them and

Um I copied and pasted an email that was full of information um you can use that kind of an idea same I won't build it again but you can celebrate that new hire a little bit more you can in their intake form you could say you know what is your favorite drink or what's your favorite snack um and then have the the person who got that email say hey go order them a drink and bring it over see how they're doing just to kind of get Rapport going sometimes relationships is what makes or breaks uh how a staff does um so you can do more than just say hey they're here go say hi you could say hey let's do this but and and pass along information about that um the way I got that information was to create some custom Fields you know what's your drink what's

A snack you like it was put right in the very first um uh question uh the the form that they filled out right at the very start so that you got kind of some background information so you can you can beef that out as much as you want um with regards to that email back and forth to people okay birthday greetings everybody asks about birthday greetings a lot um because they're very nice it helps people you know you're you're considering them that kind of thing so they feel appreciated and seen this in this case for we're just going to do a very SI simple happy birthday email um in the case of Staff you don't have as much uh to work with so in this case we're going to actually set up a schedule for them to have

That um send a happy happy birthday email once a year so to do that I got to find my windows here see if I can do this with my the blue is my cheat sheet so helps me remember what I'm supposed to show you do this okay all right so what we're going to do is we're going to create a custom field so that's going to be done up here and you're going to hit custom Fields I'm going to open it in a new tab and we're going to just do a birthday um so you're going to add a custom field here and we're going to do birthday and birthday you can use

It here because we want it for our staff we want to do it a staff and this is going to be a date field and you're just going to add it right there so that gets you the field you need you're going to need to add that field to that intake form or whichever part of the process you have that get stuff like their birthday their address and stuff but somehow they're going to get the data in there that's what we need for here and we're going to go over to create a schedule now now that's under automations and we're going to open up this one and we're going to add a schedule so you have directs and Dynamics this is going to be a direct schedule because we're going to use this based on a custom

Date and I'm just going to pull up my cheat sheet to make sure I do this right we're going to go to staff birthday email um is going to be a staff Target based and it's it's going to be um the date of a date custom field just double check I got that right yes and we're going to create that nope birthday here we go okay so now that your schedule is created you can go inside of it and you're going to create automations using this automations button here this

This one's going to be reasonably simple they can get very complicated in here we're going to do one Automation and it's going to be triggering after five minutes so we want it to happen the same day that it's their birthday we put that in there and we're going to add an email to the Target and we're going to do happy birthday right so the schedules is if it's a New Concept for you the best way to describe it is it's much like

A drip campaign of emails that you might be used to um seeing but the schedules is scheduled automations okay so as she chose on the way in she would choose one of the options was from the minute moment they're added to the list to the schedule and then that can be the based on date and in that case you can only do automations out into the future obviously because we can't send uh we can't trigger automations in the past but you can also base it on the date uh the value of a custom field which is what Kathy's done here and in the case that the the custom field is out in the future that means you can schedule automations to be triggered before that date and after that date in a reliable and uh

In a way that you can repeat over and over again for every one of your targets based on the specific value of the custom field for that particular Target okay sorry go right ahead no that's totally fine because I the vid the graphic I had there I to I was trying to find it uh probably because you pasted from one portal to another I pasted from one portal to another go there we go there's our happy birthday all right and if you haven't figured it out you can edit this and you can position and Center it however you like there's our there's our happy birthday greeting okay because this is a

Schedule and not the well I'll show you the way to do it with uh clients in a minute um but because it's a schedule we need to be a do one more thing on this one is because it's going by the birthday of the person and the birthday is going to come and go and it's going to be done so what we can do is we can actually go to set a custom field value and we're going to choose birthday you may want to name your um custom field something different if you actually want to keep their regular birthday um and and use this somewhere else but what we want to do is we want to say I want it to be uh today's date

Plus one year so so it's going to basically reset itself so it'll go by the date that you entered and then it'll reset and one thing I forgot is when we set up the custom field um the question isn't strictly birthday it is when is your next birthday and then this will work because if they do when's your next birthday is going to do the 2024 birthday and then this set custom field will'll turn it into the 2025 birthday and every time this runs it will just add on um a year to whatever that initial entry exactly this is a cool concept for everybody to understand so when the C in this case when the date happens it will send the email yes because

It's supposed to send it on that date as you say 24 and then we'll also use the custom field math to reset the based on date to next year plus one year and next year it'll run again over and over and over again so uh Wally has a question can we set a schedu or automation based on when they become clients or when they first paid their invoice yes Wally yes absolutely so getting there yeah so but yes the answer is yes you can set automations especially using schedules you can have all kinds of options on when that based on date is and then in your the best example always is a wedding right if you're setting a wedd out into the future that's the wedding date and then imagine you have a very predictable

Set of automations that you need to run before the wedding date and after the wedding date to prepare and also to think and and and follow up and all that you can build that raft of automations uh or or I guess another way to talk about is a seesaw right a seesaw of automations and that board that sits on top of the fulcrum and then you just set that fulcrum down on whichever date the the platform will set it down on whichever date you specify as the based on date and then that all those same automations predictably fire but yes the answer is yes W and it's fun to do that okay so that's a birthday greeting for a staff and it's actually easier to do one for a

Client so to do a con a birthday greeting for a contact we're actually going to go over to the automation areas to the auto templates and this is a fun place to play right so this one has logic already built into it so we're going to just do a very simple happy birthday to client and we're going to configure our first email which is just a happy birthday to you and I'm going to have I'm just going to paste it without the graphic because this is not going to paste proper um so we're going to now we're going to send it to the Target so the target is whoever

Is listed in your CRM that this is kind of aimed at okay so happy birthday you can word scribe your own put your own picture in and we're going to save that there uh to get this going we're going to have trigger logic as well um we're going to go back to our custom field and we're going to do in this case we're going to do a birthday for um yeah for our contact okay so this is a different location and we're going to do a date on this one as well okay so I've made that I'm just going to have to refresh this

Screen so it sometimes doesn't always see those new um new custom Fields so now we're going to trigger logic so this is an email that's going to get sent out and we're going to do if today's date equals now we're going to choose our custom field date uh each year so you can do just the date or you can do every year you're going to send out every year that that custom field birthday is the same as today's date it's going to shoot this thing off and that's all you have to do in the case of your anybody inside your CRM that's right that's forest for CRM targets but just to say that in the future staff targets will be also covered by the logic engine

They just are not there yet so um as is often the case in SuiteDash sometimes there's more than one way my grandfather used to always say there's more than one way to skin a cat so um I don't know if that's okay but that's what he said anyway there's more than one way to do everything right it seems like okay go right ahead no problem okay so that's the birthday greeting to the contact and we just sidebarred because it's something people want to know how to do so that's there okay so the next thing um it's adding someone to a team so so sometimes you want you know your new hire it's going to be part of a team how are they going to get there well you need to access the team chat potentially there's a dashboard for that team um and you want it to happen in a certain

Spot in this flow um in my case I'm going to say when the flow is completed so if I'm going to go to my flow here go find it we're going to go to our flow which is here and we're going to go right to the very end there's automations down here as well and I can't remember when the last time I saved so I'm just going to do that so you can add that so this is when all the whole flow this whole onboarding thing is done then I'm going to add them to a team so you're just going to grab this and add them to the sample team and that's as easy as it gets to say okay now now teams over in staff teams is very similar to circles over in the the CRM

So so think about the team can see things okay they can see and do things because they're part of the team so this person now can see the team dashboard they can access with people in their team so that's that's that all right staff training so I had a question how do I get them to get into the LMS oh sorry I'm going to go over to Wall-E here um okay for my previous question I had you must create a custom field date it's not based off an action for example okay Wally can you ask again I do have some timed out things I'll I'll go through later yeah so Wally asked Wally asked to followup and I think we can handle it uh okay so Wally says okay for my question

It's not based off an action for example 90 days after invoice is paid or days after a person becomes a client well yeah while it can be right so if you're on boarding someone and they become a client and whatever mechanism that happens or if you add them to the portal you can add them to a schedule and use the uh when you create the schedule the base on date you're going to set as when they are added to the schedule so in that moment that's the based on date and then the first automation you would want to add assuming your example is 90 days days after that moment which is the date you added them or if you are uh paying an invoice that there's an automation opportunity for uh invoices so

You configure that and then you add them to the schedule with that the moment you add them as the based on date and then your first automation will be 90 days later and that's when you send that you trigger that action that you're referring to does that make sense got it okay great the other thing you can do is um the Bas on dates fine uh you can also create a custom field uh so I've got clients in my portal that they are doing all kinds of different things so I actually say when this invoice is paid date this custom field this day and then I'll run my 90 days 100 days whatever from the custom field value as well so you can do it either way yeah and that that might have some multi-purpose uh use cases exactly yeah

But either way it's exactly right yeah okay so staff training is also pretty easy to do but I've lost my screens hold on that's the one okay let me look at my instructions so we're going to they just basically want to um give them LMS training so you've already pre-done hopefully your LMS and you want to do potentially put a quick link on the dashboard but to get them into an LMS you're going to decide what part of the flow step I can't remember what I said when the flow is completed so we're going to go down here add this and to okay I want as soon as this is all done I want them to go to the LMS so this is removing we're going to grant them and staff orientation now they have access to

Staff orientation as soon as this is finished okay that's that one I haven't built it out much so we're not going to go look at it uh so staff training that's one thing you can do with them another thing you can do um sometimes performance reviews so this is sort of in line with what Wally was asking um do you want to review if they're on like a three-month probation are you are you going to keep track of how long that three months is or do you want the portal to say hey don't forget they have to let's review before probation's over because it's a lot easier to house someone if they're not performing before probation than after so we can set up a schedule for this as

Well so we're going to set a custom field date let me go do this so I'm going to go through the the custom field example if I can remember what I'm doing so we're going to do field name official start date you can do that um the other one you can do if you want to so this is a probation strictly after three months I want to meet with them but if you want it ongoing you could name this differently um and actually I like to I don't like spaces up here but you're you're old school Kathy like me I am totally oldo you know I know I can rename my files with spaces in them now and on all operating systems but I just still

Can't do it I can't do it yeah okay and this is going to be a staff one again um and we're going to put a date on this one I can remember what I'm doing all right so this is going to be the official start date that we're going to take we're going to go over to schedules again so that's under automation schedules and we're going to add another schedule go find it I'm getting my cheat sheet and this is a wonderful example really uh when you on board a new staff and then you can remind yourself okay so 90 days is coming up but you send an maybe send an email to the appropriate person 80 days after and

Say hey heads up with this person is approaching their uh 90day probation etc etc so really really good example you okay so we're going to do staff targets again and it does rewrite if you choose the wrong thing So based on so that based on date added to the schedule Wally that's the one Mike was talking about if you trigger it just from one thing um we're going to do this one and we're going to choose official start date okay so we got that this is the schedule the Automation in here oops hold on go the right spot

Going to hit an automation we're going to trigger do sorry last one I called it yeah that's fine so this one we're going to trigger after I've got 75 days because three months is kind of a common uh probation period in this case um here we're going to book our performance review configure this you can do whatever you want with all these and the timings but uh we're going to send this one we're

Going to email to the Target and we're going to just give them a little message for things they have to do to prepare and we're going to email internal so we're going to send a note to whoever's in charge of them and we're going to do B oops performance review and we're going to go with that there and I think that's uh oh and we're oh in my I in my example I've got add to team on this this step too so you could you could also whenn you're at

This point add to team I put that somewhere else that gets that there so that's going to give you an email and them an email to prepare for their um performance VI review think I got that all except I can't see my save button create go hey everybody everybody's good you're super quiet to people come on no no questions some questions okay so that is kind of like yeah you can you can remind yourself schedules are super fun uh I use them all the time uh what else do we have here and probationary period

Same basic same thing okay so this is going to be you're going to get another email if they want um you can do a congratulations the t uh I on my example I've got like a team lunch okay so so they can do basically you're going to build it all the same uh so that's your performance review schedule you could even build it on top of the same one if you wanted to so there's one automation for the performance review so could do another automation here um that uh you're going to trigger after 3 months and this would be their their party because they passed probations

Right so we're going to configure automations um so you can in this case you're going to send the email to the Target super congratulations way to go and put whatever you want in there um so they can do that you can also email the team so something you could do is email internal you can actually email the whole team that they're on and say uh save the date um you kind of want it to be sorry I lost my template you in this case you can't really book a date but you can say hey go check with so and so that

The team lunch for for this person's um celebration is find out when it is so you're get to given them poke to go check with the supervisor do I make sense there definitely and and Kathy could you just hit the plus sign there I just want to point out something that's really powerful that maybe is not initially obvious so you can create scheduled automations that have a schedule that maybe you're looking for someone to complete an action and let's use a simple example you want to remind them and you create a schedule that says every two weeks or not every two weeks you create say 10 follow-ups or five follow-ups is more reasonable and you schedule them out seven days 14 days 21 days

And you're trying to get them to accomplish a task maybe you know come back and do this or or do whatever you need them to do but then they they they don't do it and and and you on the on the task that you need them to accomplish you have removed from schedule so when they accomplish it you remove them from the schedule and they don't get reminded anymore that's a pretty typical workflow but then on the schedule that the reminder schedule you can have the last uh automation move them to a different schedule so as you see here you have remove from schedule and add to schedule you can actually remove them in the last step from the schedule they're currently on which is actually the schedule that's removing them from itself and then add them to another schedule which

Maybe has a little bit harsher language or which maybe has uh a task a member of your staff to follow up with them manually and and call them or visit them or whatever the case may be but the point is you can daisy chain schedules together in that way so that uh if whatever H doesn't happen in the uh that you're trying to accomplish in the first schedule you can move them to a second schedule which would be kind of like a code yellow and then a code red or something like that and David ask are schedules for staff only no definitely not David um but when you create a schedule you will designate whether it's for staff or CRM targets and then the automations that are available to you will be customized to to

Be appropriate for either one whichever one you choose yep yeah so in the case because we've stacked um this one to oops I so didn't save that um didn't oh I did hold on great so because we stacked their probationary review and their celebration date on the same schedule somehow possibly if you made up a um something for the the this the supervisor to fill in that they past probation if they failed their probationary period you have to take them out of this schedule so somehow you want to take them out of the schedule so that they don't get celebrated if

They're still not working for you so you have to kind of think through the logic do you want this to be stacked together do you want it to be separate um can you pause in schedule or is there something that can trigger them to be removed like if yeah you can totally re remove them um so in the case if we go over to the I can show you the what's available for the um client side let me find them exactly Julia in any one of the automation opportunities you can it has removed schedule so uh if if if a supervisor for example filled out a form that was the dismissal form or whatever in this example one of the automations you trigger on that form submission is remove them from the schedule um

You know that was that had that celebration automation coming up so when they got removed from it then you don't have any fear of them get receiving those emails anymore yeah these are so you get a lot more options this is the client side so the CRM side you have a lot more options of what you can put into a schedule one of the ways I use it on the client side so I do coaching is is I do a discovery call and then I have a schedule that uh does a the next day email it does uh two days later it does oh hey your um your fee fee quote is about to expire so I've got kind of a a running series of follow-up emails with that first call and then I have another step if

They become a client I take them out of that and then they go into a different schedule for something else so you kind of have to think through how do I want to communicate and then I want to stop this communication with them when they move to the next the step you can customize the messaging using something like this based on where they are in your funnel where they are in your process yeah yeah so so yeah lots lots of options as far as what you can have timed out so it's primarily timing these things out okay you want I'll get i'll Mike can read that question Don says I have he's saying he has a workflow set up that when an invoice is paid it removes the target from a schedule that they were added to when the invoice was generated right

So Don's probably have has his schedule that's saying hey you need to pay that invoice don't forget to pay that invoice hey what about that invoice but when they pay it then he takes them off that schedule so no more reminders no more uh messages about that yeah yeah yeah yeah and if you have have a client that you really don't want to work with do you want to take them out of the happy birthday emails and such so although if they put them inactive they'll be taken out of the schedule so I guess you don't have to remember all of that okay all right end of probationary period I think I covered most of that kind of idea it's just these are just ideas to kind of let your brain kind of go oh I could do that or I could do that um those are kind of the onboarding ones I

Thought about for as a brand new staff comes in you those are kind of some of the things you can have triggered off as they go through a process um things you can think about as well for um you could maybe get their certification updates so do you need to set up a uh a schedule and you can trigger it with that flow so so a schedule to remind them hey your first aid is about to be uh uh expired book a call or however you want to do that or checklist you can certainly fire a checklist so annual reminders to do that kind of thing um you can schedule those emails you can also put hide and unhide things on their team dashboard so as a certification is

Coming up due uh you could say okay show them the hey your certifications is due on the dashboard and then you take them back out of the sorry the team the team can see that team can come back out um so I'm not going to run through all these unless you want me to but I've kind of got some other regular performance review basically works the same way as that um the three-month one but you can have it just trigger um you get you reset that custom field to every year and then you can get a reminder or every six months however often you do performance you can have those go out as well um you can also track years of service this is kind of fun um with with the math so let me find my years of service and they all can be triggered

Right here you start them with this first flow and then they'll get sequenced at whatever you timed out so we're going to do math I love SuiteDash math okay so track years of service this is going to be for your staff and it's just going to be a number in this case I believe going by memory here pretty sure it's a number I'm double checking though because it'll be embarrassing if I'm wrong we've all been wrong y don't worry that's

Okay all right we'll go with number okay so we're going to add that yeah okay so years of service is going to be uh a field you actually don't have to actually put it anywhere except into your schedule so uh so we can put it into where are we going to put it sorry I'm bouncing around here because I'm in Christmas greetings throwing me off okay so we'll make a fresh schedule for this one we're going oh good grief so

We're going to add to the schedule this is going to be custom do we yeah we'll do this one sorry I'm thinking out loud ah going to be a staff and going to do I like date of custom field because I can change it if I make a mistake but you can certainly do it um others so we're going to base this one on the official start date and years of service we're going to go in there automation

Add an Automation and it's going to do some Ma so we're going to trigger after one year okay guess we're doing 12 months we intentionally left years out because we we didn't want people saying oh after 10 years let's run this one so at least if it's months it's months you have to really think okay how many months is this so you may not want to give them a a gold yeah let's not let's not use decades you know centuries we don't need to use that yeah did I do that wrong again

Am I in the staff or the I can't remember and one thing to point out too that if it's not clear for everyone so if there are 100 targets that go through your workflow and you add a 100 targets based you know obviously they're not at the same time every single Target as they are added to a schedule in this case or to an audience in the other case of the same logic is if you use something like um the date they're B the date they're added every single one has a very unique based on date typically and so every single one is going to receive the same treatment but all centered and based around that based on date that's unique to that Target so again

It's it's a way that you can replicate and standardize your processes every single one gets the same experience but customized to them based on either a custom field date that you collect from them or the date they're added etc etc so it's all about application of systems and processes okay I think I figured it out so we're going to base it on the year they signed up so the date that they signed up but it's going to count years of service so whenever every 12 months this is going to run and it's going to take the current value currently zero because they just got hired they're going to add one to it and then next year uh there um next

The uh because the other one is adding a year to it we don't have to worry about it it's going to actually add a year so this one's going to run that probably got confusing but so that will run and add one to the years of service there and then the the other one will did I make sense Mike I think so well you'll need to you know cycle yeah you have to cycle it through so so yeah I'll I'll do it again I think I've already got it somewhere but so you're going to do that you're going to that's a custom field again yeah where' it go because

We're doing yeah so you may want to name it something differently but you're going to do date calculations so that's your current day plus yeah in this case you would probably sort of create an alternative trigger date what we would in programming call a swivel date and we would just use this swivel date as plus one plus one plus one and that will just it it'll only serve it'll be behind the scenes all the time serving that purpose yes yeah yeah so you would name it something different so you could have that official start date that not move and then You' have the years something else that does move and then your counter

Would your your schedule will be based on that okay I probably just confused everybody because I just confused myself well it's a good example of SuiteDash designed to become the operating system of your organization what does that mean it means that you can make it you can program it you know we give you these tools that are equivalent to a programming language but in a no code way that you can create flags and create swivel dates and all these things behind the scenes use math and combinations and calculating custom fields to uh do your calculations and and reset dates and all these automations and the logic engine all those things work together to create a machine that you can build like that

Um the one you showed earlier that's which I of course Watch Remember watching with Dick van djk and so you can create your own little uh machine there Goldberg machine okay go ahead okay I'm done that so you guys can start we got 10 minutes left if you have IDE thoughts we can that's very good yeah I'm sorry I did get if you got confused on the last one come to one of my help sessions well this ambitious and I think there's nothing wrong with that and we we showed a lot of ways to do a lot of things as always has been the plan all the automations all the functionalities focus first on CRM targets clients because that's most

Common in small medium businesses and in small medium businesses of course staff and onboarding staff and doing all these automations with staff is sort of a secondary because typically you might have one two five 10 people in your company but onboarding and automating staff things is is less of a concern so as you see staff AIT our HR side and all these staff onboarding and automations and those things are a little bit behind mind and that was always intentional but when we get staff added to the logic engine and you know eventually all the same things will be possible with staff as we have with CRM targets and then and some of the things that you that you did there which all worked and are all possible can

Be done in a more simple way the auto templates are much simpler and yes Don I think Don you're right so if you set the schedule to increase the years of service and then send the email it'll be ready for that year and then ready to be bumped up for the next year yes definitely simplify you can simplify what I tried to do there it's because I was winging it and I probably shouldn't do that I'm curious how many people here are using uh schedules because it's a really powerful part of the platform um has it has its place and it's when when you need it it has to be that but I'm just curious how many people have taken advantage of it and also the logic engine schedule's good mhm excellent

Anybody uh intaking dates that are out into the future because that's this is one thing that I I just I wish I could scream it from the from the rooftops uh to to tell people you know I think Tim Tim might be uh thinking about when you tax dates is is one thing that would would come up right obviously the April 15th and in the US or whatever the date is around your country or your use case but to be able to set a date out into the future a conference date a wedding date any kind of date that's out into the future and then SE and then take a prescripted set of automations that can be before

That date and after that date and always functions the same no matter when you set it down and you can set it right down on top of that date and get a predictable response predictable result every time um something that I really honestly don't haven't seen in in other software except for except for the the super flexible ones like air table you could build that in air table I'm sure you could build that in other some other of these types of softwares but SuiteDash is designed for it right out of the box no code and pretty small learning curve once you understand the concepts of based on date then it works just like a a drip campaign except it has reverse drip

Reverse dates negatives so it's it's it's pretty pretty great for that any other questions guys and I'll I'll open it up about any subject let's let's let's we could do an ama if you want that always seems to bring out the good questions okay good Wally so typically we'll post these on YouTube uh trying to be less than 24 hours if we can they're also in the academy if you go to your fly out menu um into the SuiteDash Academy that's where that's where we're actually Gathering some of the topics is the missing videos in that area we're

Just trying to fill those in that's right are schedules similar to Auto templates David says not David they're similar in some ways but let me see if I can in a in a nutshell sort of describe the differences an auto template is a pre-built set of automations that are all going to fire at one time and they're T they're designed to be fired by the logic engine which will be looking for some set of logic to return true and uh or they're they're designed to be fired by your staff manually so in a situation where you say

Uh you come to a place where you have all this information and now you need to decide where you're where what is going to happen next with this Target and maybe you have three scenarios you build an auto template for all three scenarios and then based on whichever your staff defines okay this person is now we needing moving them into scenario b or whatever ever it looks like in your company your organization then you maybe you have an auto templates that auto template designed to execute say six tasks that will start them down that path email this person email that person email them to let them know what's happening add them to a project set them up on another uh marketing audience and and and to receive uh

Messaging Etc and then you can trigger that auto template with just a few clicks and then boom all those automations happen and they're off on an automation train again uh so autot temps are designed for that schedules are designed for a sequence of automations to happen based on time periods so separated by say seven days typically I guess would be an example so if you were at if you came into my company and you and you were a client uh in a certain for a certain product I might set up set set you up on a schedule and then seven days later I would trigger these automations and 14 days after the after I would trigger

Another set of automations um there's a lot of complex ways to use it it's very simple if you think about it in terms of maybe just messaging to your staff about something or reminder sequences but you can take it to levels of complexity where you can change a person's experience or put them in a certain pathway and then change it move them to another schedule that's correct so that makes sense David good okay another question Tim you take your time I'll see if I can hang around Lauren says there an ETA on reporting plus Business Health from the road map Well's see Lauren the first the Leading Edge of that will be

Available this week yeah and we call it the reporting block you saw it in uh mockup form in a sneak peek VIP session previously and it will be released on production I believe this week and that's sort of the first Leading Edge and then the reporting toolkit is also being developed behind the scenes as well and is uh fairly mature at this point so we're moving in this direction reporting plus Business Health I would definitely say and make sure that it's clear it's not one feature It Won't Be One release it's a it's an initiative that we're moving in a direction that will get stronger and

Stronger and stronger reporting will give you reports from timers over the time as we move along reports from projects as we move along the reporting toolkit will be is design and generic way that we can plug all sorts of reports into it um over time and expand it out so that you'll have that kind of capability across all the toolkits in ways that make sense and Julia the checkout form also imminent Julia can I say imminent like a matter of I believe also this week Julia I believe this week almost last week but we is this portal the same is this a demo portal or is it that is yeah okay

Well sneak peek here this is a test account you're in and you're seeing go ahead we can click allow if you want to do that it's really okay and then click checkout form here it is this is production this is a test account and it is live here and still still in final phases of testing but this is the checkout form you see configure checkout options you will find this very familiar if you've been working in proposals where we have the same functionality add-ons some packages and you can present these for offer these for choices so this is very very close a long time coming a

Lot of groundw work put in place to reach this and even even more on the way so I I'm excited the tomorrow might or this Friday is planned to be one of the biggest fresh on lives that we've probably ever had and we'll continue so there you go okay so if I confused you today come to one of my Live support sessions I'll unconfuse you but hopefully that was helpful yes it was I thought it was really really good thank you Kathy and thank you guys for all the questions Julia is Happy dancing like Snoopy I love that and Lauren thank you good you're welcome the reporting feature has been a long time coming agreed uh but now we have I think

A really it was always a kind of thing that we we wanted to um wait until it's really clear what needed to be built and when the timing was right and now you know we're we're we're past that place and have already started and we're on the way so it'll come together quickly and it's just a natural a natural thing for us to provide now of course because we have all of the so much data if when a business is built on on this platform and functions on this platform we have most of the data of the business so now it's hey let's let's start to feed back and give you tools so that you can get some some visibility on how things are going um part of the release

This week is also expenses so you'll be able to record expenses you'll have recurring expenses uh to come soon after so now you don't have just the income now you can report expenses and get yourself a nice profit loss over time so all kinds of things on the way that will lead us in these directions so all right well thanks everyone thanks in in uh to coach Kathy and thank you to you all to all the VIPs hope you have a great rest of your day everyone thank you David thank you w-e thank you Don thank you Lauren thank you Tim thank you Julia Kena thank you all right David we'll see you guys in the next one all right have a great rest of your day bye everyone by a

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