Feature Spotlight: How to Use Automated Workflows

Automated Workflows are a powerful GoFormz feature, enabling users to capture, route, and process data in real-time. Whether you’re sending a completed form to a customer or colleague, uploading data into Cloud storage, or creating a new form from a completed form, Automated Workflows streamline data collection and ensure the secure capture and storage of critical information. Our February LinkedIn Newsletter outlines how to set up and use Automated Workflows within your digital forms –?follow along with the guide below.

Using Automated Workflows

Automated Workflow Basics

Use Automated Workflows to automate manual tasks like uploading forms to Cloud storage applications and routing copies of completed forms to colleagues, clients, and more. Before you get started using this feature, it’s important to understand the key elements of a Workflow:

• Triggers and Actions: Each Workflow contains a series of steps. These steps include a Trigger and one or more Actions. A Trigger initiates a Workflow, while Actions dictate each subsequent step. For example, if your Workflow’s Trigger was a user completing a form, the following Action could be uploading a copy of that completed document to Cloud storage.?
• Recipes: A Recipe is a ready-to-use blueprint for your Workflow. Recipes provide the series of Triggers and Actions that your Workflow will follow, which you can easily customize to meet your unique Workflow needs. For example, you can leverage a Workflow Recipe to automatically email a completed form to a contact. For this Recipe, you would customize the Template of the form you would like shared, the email of the recipient, and the content of your email.

What Tasks Can Workflows Automate?

Workflows can be used to automate just about anything –?here are a few examples, broken down by subscription tier:

Team Edition:

• Uploade files to applications like Box, Dropbox, and Google Workspace (and more)
• Export Forms to a PDF
• Pull Images from a Form
• Share completed forms via email

Advanced Edition (includes all of the Team edition)

• Upload files to applications like OneDrive and BIM 360?
• Change a Form's status
• Upsert rows in third-party spreadsheets and workbooks
• Create a Form
• Create a Public Form
• Export Reports to CSV
• Pull Form File Attachments

How to Create an Automated Workflow

Configuring a new Workflow is easy. To get started, navigate to the ‘Workflows’ tab in GoFormz the GoFormz web application. Next:?

1. Select ‘Workflows’ from the menu bar. Once you land in the Workflows tab, select? ‘Create’ in the upper right-hand corner or ‘Set Up Workflow’ in the center of the screen.?
2. The ‘Workflow Recipe Library’ will load. Your subscription tier will determine how many recipes are visible. Workflow Recipes will be labeled with Team, Advanced, and Enterprise, based on availability.?
3. Select which Recipe you would like to use to build your Workflow.
4. Customize the Trigger of your Workflow. Add in any necessary information needed, like a specific Template name or user Group.?
5. Customize the Action of your Workflow. Add in any necessary information, like email details, Cloud storage folders, and more.?
6. Click ‘Save’ in the upper right corner of the screen.
7. Toggle the ‘Active’ button to on for your Workflow.?
8. Run a test and make sure your Workflow operates as expected.

When initially setting up a Workflow, it’s important to remember some best practices to establish a great foundation for future Workflow builds:

• Name your form fields: While it may seem like a simple step, establishing a standardized naming convention for your form fields is often overlooked during the Template-building process. When form fields lack proper names, they are automatically assigned generic names like "Text 13," which can make it difficult for both form users and creators to remember the exact purpose of each field. This can become particularly challenging when extracting or referencing information from specific fields within Workflows.
• Save completed Templates: For a Workflow to run successfully, the form Template has to be saved and published. Without a published Template, there is no master document for the Workflow to operate on, resulting in the inability to execute the Workflow.

Customer Spotlights: Automated Workflows in Action

Electrical Contractor: A-C Electric Company A-C Electric Company’s in-house form solution was faced with a few key limitations, notably its dependence on internet connectivity for form completion. This resulted in A-C Electric Company staff having to redo forms whenever an internet connection was lost. Additionally, field personnel were required to complete certain forms on paper, requiring manual phone-in submissions to centralize data.

Leveraging Data Sources, Automated Workflows, and SQL integration, A-C Electric Company digitized and streamlined its approval workflows, collaboration, and communication. The ability to fill out and complete forms offline empowers field personnel to digitally complete documentation from remote locations, ensuring real-time access to data and effectively centralizing data management across the entire organization. Learn more here >

“GoFormz allows us to effortlessly split and route orders to different teams, streamlining data entry and creating a smart, automated system that efficiently directs orders for fulfillment.” – Emily Turner, Systems Analyst, A-C Electric Company

Ready to streamline your data collection experience with Automated Workflows? Explore how Automated Workflows can improve your data process management by trying it out in GoFormz today or reading our step-by-step guide!