Most follow-ups don’t fail because somebody decided against them. They fail because it was Thursday, the invoice was eleven days late, and nobody remembered.
A workflow is the follow-up written down once: when this happens, and these things are true, do that - today, in a week, in two weeks. It runs whether or not anybody is looking, and it stops on its own when the reason for it goes away.
What you can do
- Chase overdue invoices with reminders that get firmer as the days go by.
- Read a reminder before it goes, or let it send on its own. Each step decides.
- Send one email per customer listing everything they owe, with every invoice attached.
- Follow up a quote that expired without an answer.
- Welcome a new customer, or thank one the day their order confirmation is finalized.
- Create a task for whoever owns the record, or a named person, when something needs a human.
- Act on leads and deals: a new lead, a deal that moves stage, is won or lost, or hasn’t moved in a while.
- Start from a ready-made workflow and change the wording and timing, rather than building from nothing.
- See why a customer got an email, or why they didn’t, record by record.
How it works in practice
Start from a preset (CRM → Activities → Workflows, then New workflow). The gallery is grouped by what you’re trying to do: customers and orders, payments, quotes, and the sales pipeline. Picking one opens it already worded and timed. Nothing exists until you save, so looking costs nothing. Start blank is there when none of them fit.
Read it as a flowchart. The builder draws the workflow the way you’d sketch it: the trigger at the top, an only if box for the conditions with its No exit, then one box per step listing what it does. The arrows say how long each wait is and when the whole thing stops early. Click any box to edit it beside the chart.
A workflow is one trigger, some conditions, and steps on a timeline. The trigger is the moment it starts: a quote is emailed, an invoice is 14 days overdue, a customer is added, a webshop order comes in. Conditions narrow it down - a document’s total or currency, a customer’s country, a deal’s pipeline or amount - and all of them have to hold. Each step is timed from the start (on the day, after 7 days, after 14 days) and runs its actions in order. Reminders at 7, 14, 21 and 28 days are one workflow with four steps, not four workflows.
Payment reminders run on reminder terms (Settings → Reminder Terms). These are workflows too, in the same builder, on an Invoices tab and a Quotes tab. A new company starts with Standard payment reminders: a friendly email 7 days after the due date, a firmer one at 14, a final one at 28, every one held for review. One set is the default for each kind. Give a customer a different set in its Document defaults, or a single invoice in its own settings.
Decide what waits for a person. Each reminder step has a subject, a message and a switch. Send automatically sends it at the next hourly check. Hold for review parks it under Sales → Payment Reminders → To review, where somebody reads it and presses Send or Discard. Going out next shows what the next check will send.
What your customer gets. Your message, then a table of their overdue invoices - what’s still open on each, how many days late, and a Pay now link where the invoice has one - with every invoice’s PDF attached. A customer with four late invoices gets one email, not four, worded by the furthest-along step. If their accounts team wants one email per invoice, tick Send payment reminders one e-mail per invoice in the customer’s Document defaults.
When a customer calls to say they never got it, open the invoice and use Send reminder now. The next reminder goes into To review, worded by that customer’s terms.
Write it in your own words, with the details filled in. Messages take merge fields like
{{contact.name}} or {{document.number}}, and the builder lists the ones available. A field that
has no value prints nothing, rather than its name in curly brackets.
Find out what happened. Every workflow shows how many records are in progress, done and stopped. Records and runs opens the latest fifty: where each one is (2 of 4 steps done · next 14 Oct), every step it ran, and each action marked done, skipped or failed with the reason. That’s where “why did this customer get that email” gets answered, and so does “why didn’t they get the third one”.
Good to know
- A workflow stops when it no longer makes sense. Before every step it checks again: an invoice paid or credited gets no more reminders, and a quote accepted or declined, a deal closed, or a lead converted all stop too. The record’s history says why, rather than going quiet.
- Nobody gets more than one automated email from you in 24 hours. A reminder that would be a second one waits for a later hourly check rather than being dropped. A person pressing Send in the review queue isn’t held back by it.
- Every automated email carries an opt-out link. An address that opted out gets nothing, and the history says so.
- Switching a workflow on doesn’t reach into the past. “Email customers 14 days overdue” starts with the invoices that cross 14 days after you create it, not everyone who has owed you money since last year.
- Editing changes only what hasn’t happened yet. Steps already done stay done. A step you add after its day has passed for a record is skipped for that record, not sent late.
- Pausing is safe. A paused workflow holds every record where it is. Switch it back on and a step more than a week overdue is skipped rather than sent in a burst.
- There are no branches. No “wait until they reply”, no SMS. A change one workflow makes never starts another. It’s for the follow-ups a team forgets, not a marketing-automation builder.
- The hourly check runs on UTC, so a scheduled email can arrive at night in your customer’s time zone.
- Customer emails are plain text turned into simple HTML. They don’t use your designed email templates. The quote reminder is the exception: it sends your Quote reminder template, in the quote’s language, with the PDF.
- Reminders don’t charge fees or interest. A reminder is an email and a line in the invoice’s history, not a document.
- Lead and deal triggers need the Sales pipeline switched on (Settings → Extensions), and the webshop order trigger needs the webshop. Everything else, payment reminders included, works without either.