Workflows & automation

“I forgot to call him back.” “Nobody chased that invoice.” “The quote sat for a week.” Most of what slips in a small business is a reminder nobody sent. A BizOS automation is one sentence: when something happens → check a few things → do something. Turn a few on and BizOS chases overdue invoices, thanks customers, nudges quotes and rescues idle leads while you work.

Where do I find automations?

Automations sit under Grow → Automations in the web app. The page lists each automation with its trigger, an on/off switch, how many times it has run and when it last ran. Owners, Admins and Managers can build, edit, pause, test and delete automations; other fixed roles do not see the page. See Roles & permissions.

For the everyday customer messages (payment reminders, invoice and quote sent, job updates, delivery reminders) you do not need an automation at all: they are switches under Settings → Customer messages → Automatic messages. Build an automation when you want your own rule, such as a birthday wish or a three-step payment escalation.

Start from a template

The Automations page offers five ready templates. Each is one tap to install and fully editable afterwards:

Which events can start an automation?

Forty triggers. Sweeps (marked daily) are checked once each morning, IST, rather than the moment something happens.

Sweeps are idempotent: a re-run on the same day cannot send twice. The invoice-overdue, follow-up and contract sweeps run at 07:00 IST; the others run later in the morning.

Conditions: the “check”

Conditions are optional filters that decide whether the actions run. A condition reads a field the trigger carries (the invoice total, the customer’s tags, the lead’s pipeline or source, the days overdue, the job’s stage, the feedback rating, the branch on a sales order, or one of your custom fields) and compares it with an operator that suits its type. Join several with AND or OR.

The builder shows labels, never raw field paths. A WhatsApp variable that could not be filled at send time is refused when you save, not discovered weeks later as a message with a hole in it.

Actions: the “do”

Recipients can be the owner, the customer, the lead, a specific team member, or a phone number (fixed, or taken from the event, such as the phone posted by another system).

When you save, BizOS checks each action against your own access: you cannot build an automation that assigns leads, books jobs or sends WhatsApp if your role cannot do that by hand, and only an Owner or Admin can add a webhook.

How do I build a payment reminder sequence that stops when the customer pays?

Multi-step sequences with a wait and a stop if guard are what collect money without annoying people who already paid:

The stop if step is the difference between automation people trust and automation people switch off.

Will an automation message my customers at night?

Two things control timing:

• Wait steps respect quiet hours by default. A wait that would end between 9 pm and 9 am IST resumes at 9 am. The switch is on each Wait step (“Quiet hours (9 pm – 9 am IST)”), so you can turn it off for an internal reminder.
• An instant trigger acts when the event happens. A payment thank-you goes out when the payment is recorded, even late in the evening. If that matters, put a short Wait with quiet hours on before the message.

How do I know an automation is working?

Open an automation to see its runs; open a run to see every step: what executed, what was skipped, what failed and why, with timestamps.

• Test run fires the automation with sample data, so you can check it before real customers are involved.
• A run that fails part-way resumes after the last step that succeeded, so messages that already went are not sent again.
• Pausing keeps the history; deleting removes the automation and its past runs.
• When a trigger’s module is not on your plan (leads without CRM & Leads, jobs without Jobs, rentals without Rentals), that trigger simply does not fire, and a Create job step is skipped without Jobs. You can always switch an automation off.

Connect BizOS to other software

The Call webhook action POSTs the trigger data to an HTTPS address you control, optionally signed with a shared secret (HMAC-SHA256 in the X-BizOS-Signature header) so your system can check it came from BizOS. Private and local network addresses are refused.

The other direction is Event from another system: your website, a school portal or an ERP posts a named event (for example fee_overdue or order_shipped) with an API key. Conditions select on the event name and any value in its payload, and a WhatsApp action can use a phone number carried in the payload.

Plan availability

Building your own automations comes with the Billing base. Each trigger also needs the module that produces it, as in the table above. See Plans & pricing.