Workflows and your procedures manual

A workflow is a named set of steps you run often enough to be tired of retyping: setting up a new contractor, offboarding someone, the monthly compliance sweep. Apply it and you get a task with those steps already on it.

Each step can also carry a written procedure, the paragraph that says how the step is done. Once your workflows carry those, you have something more useful than a checklist: a documented way of working that prints as a manual you can hand a new starter.

Building a workflow

Open Tasks. The right-hand column is Workflows. Type a name (up to 200 characters) and click Create, then expand it and add its steps in order. Drag the handle on a step to reorder. The pencil beside a workflow renames it and sets its category.

Click a step to open its procedure. Write one short line per instruction, up to 4,000 characters in all; each line is numbered for you. A badge on the step counts the lines, so you can see at a glance which steps are documented and which are still bare titles.

A good step title says what to do. The procedure says how, in enough detail that someone who has never done it can follow along.

Procedures are shared, not copied

The procedure text is stored once on the workflow and referenced by every task made from it. It is not copied. So when you correct a procedure, every task already created from that workflow shows the corrected text immediately, including tasks created months ago and still open. There is no reissuing and no stale copies drifting apart.

The trade-off is at the other end: delete a workflow and the tasks made from it survive as ordinary tasks, keeping their steps but losing the written procedures, because the text they were pointing at is gone. The delete confirmation says so.

Applying one

From the Workflows column, click Add on a workflow. You get one task named after the workflow, with its steps underneath as that task's steps. On the task, the badge beside a step opens its procedure.

On a portal, open the Tasks section and use Apply workflows. That one ticks several at once and gives you one task per workflow, so three applied workflows read as three jobs rather than one heap of steps.

Nothing prompts you for a name, because the task it creates is an ordinary task: use Edit to rename it. That is how you tell two runs of the same workflow apart ("Onboard R. Patel" rather than two rows both called "New contractor").

An automation can apply one too. On an automation's action, pick a workflow and it is applied whenever that automation fires.

Printing the manual

Procedures under Reports (or Print procedures above the Workflows column) prints every workflow and its procedures as one document. Options before you print:

Categories. Tick the ones you want. Tick none and you get everything, uncategorised workflows included. Sections come out in the order you set under Categories.
Show logo. Puts your logo on it, taken from your default branding theme. If you have not set one there, the option tells you so rather than printing a gap.
Print completion box. Adds an empty box against every step and a smaller one against each line of its procedure, which turns the manual into something that can be worked through and ticked off on paper.

Then Download PDF, Download CSV, or Print. The printed version is deliberately full black rather than grey, because a procedure gets photocopied and pinned up and grey text does not survive that.

If the manual comes out thin, it is usually because the steps have titles but no procedures. The report is only as good as what is written against each step.

Getting help

If something here does not match what you see on screen, email [email protected] and we will take a look.