Connecting the tools you already have

Most small-business automation is one tool telling another tool that something happened. The category has a dull shape and understanding the shape matters more than choosing the product, because the products come and go.

The shape

Every workflow is a trigger, some steps, and a destination. A thing happens, something is done to the information, and it ends up somewhere. That is all. The complexity people encounter is almost never in the concept and almost always in the data.

1. 01Trigger: a form submitted, a payment received, a message arriving, a row added, a date reached, a schedule firing.
2. 02Filter: only the ones that matter. Skipping this is why people get a hundred notifications on day two.
3. 03Transform: reformat the date, split the name, map their dropdown to your categories, fill the field the destination insists on.
4. 04Action: create, update, send, file, notify.
5. 05Handle the failure: what happens when the destination refuses it, which it will.

Choosing between the ways of doing it

• A built-in integration between two tools you already pay for. Always try this first. Nothing to maintain and nothing extra to pay for, and it usually covers the obvious case.
• A connector platform, where you assemble steps visually. Fast to build, costs a monthly fee that scales with how much runs through it, and you are inside somebody's product.
• A direct connection written as code. More work up front, no per-task fee, and it does exactly what you wrote. Reasonable if you or somebody nearby writes code, a trap if not.
• A spreadsheet with formulas and a scheduled script. Unfashionable, free, understood by everybody, and the right answer more often than it is suggested.

The faults that recur

1. 01No deduplication, so the same record arrives twice and you have two of everything.
2. 02Dates and time zones, which is the single most common source of wrong data. Decide one zone and convert at the edges.
3. 03Names arriving as one field and needed as two, or the reverse, done with a rule that breaks on the first person with two surnames.
4. 04A connection that depends on one person's account, and stops when their password changes or they leave.
5. 05No record of what ran. If the workflow leaves no log, a failure is invisible and so is the cause.

Keep a list

One page: what each workflow does, what triggers it, which accounts it uses, and who to tell when it breaks. Ten workflows is enough to lose track, and an undocumented one that stops is worse than no workflow at all, because the work silently stops being done and nobody knows which work.

Decide where the truth lives

The decision that prevents most of the mess. For each kind of information, one system is authoritative and the others hold copies. Customer details live in one place; the rest receive them.

Without that, you get two-way synchronisation, which sounds desirable and is where small automation setups go wrong. Two systems both allowed to change the same record will eventually disagree, and resolving which version is correct is not something a workflow can do for you. One direction of flow, decided deliberately, is worth more than any amount of cleverness afterwards.

Accounts and authorisations

• Connect using an account that belongs to the business rather than to a person, so nothing breaks when somebody leaves or changes a password.
• Keep the credentials in a password manager the business controls, not in a document and not in one person's browser.
• Note which workflows use which account, because an expired authorisation breaks several things at once and the connection between them will not be obvious.
• Give each connection only the access it needs. A workflow that reads orders does not need permission to issue refunds.
• Review the connected applications list on each service once a year and remove what you no longer use.

What a person should still see

A workflow that runs invisibly is a workflow nobody understands by the third month. Where it is cheap, make the result visible: a line in a shared channel, a row added to a sheet somebody looks at, a daily summary of what ran. Not an alert for every event, which becomes noise within a week, but enough that the machinery leaves a trace and a question about what happened has an answer.