Automations

What an automation rule is

An automation rule is a standing instruction: when something happens, or at a time you choose, check whatever conditions you've set, then carry out one or more actions, the same way you'd ask a reliable office manager to handle something every time it comes up. A rule runs under your account's own system user, and as a safety rule, whoever builds or edits a rule can only give it permissions they themselves already hold. A rule can never do anything on your account that its author couldn't do by hand.

What can trigger a rule

• Something happens: a new lead comes in, a project changes (its stage, who it's assigned to, its totals), someone posts a comment or message on a project, or a calendar appointment changes.
• A schedule: a recurring time you pick, in your own timezone, with no particular lead or job behind it, useful for something like "every evening."

Once a rule is tied to a record (a project, a customer, or an appointment), you can narrow it with conditions, comparing things like a lead's source, a project's stage, or a job's total, so the rule only fires for the leads or jobs you actually mean.

What actions it can take

A rule strings together up to 20 steps, with an optional wait of up to 90 days between any of them, and each step can carry its own extra condition. The actions on offer today are:

• Move the project to a stage in your pipeline.
• Assign the project to someone on your team.
• Post a comment on the project's timeline, attributed to your company's automation user.
• Send an email or a text, to the homeowner on the project, to whoever it's assigned to, or to a colleague you name, never to a typed-in address or number.
• Send the customer one of Trussi's built-in messages (currently a review request or a referral ask), already written and translated; you only choose which one and when it goes out.
• Send a numbers recap to staff you name, by email or text; anyone on the list who can't see the cash figures gets the same recap with the money lines removed.

An older "schedule an appointment" step exists on rules built before it was withdrawn, but it's no longer offered for new rules.

Messaging stays inside the rules everyone else follows

A rule can never message a stranger. There's no field anywhere for typing in a phone number or an email address; every send names a role on the project (the homeowner, whoever it's assigned to, or a colleague you pick), resolved fresh each time the rule runs.

Reaching the homeowner also goes through the same system the rest of Trussi uses for customer messages: your account's customer portal has to be turned on, and that particular homeowner has to already have an active portal account. A customer nobody has invited to the portal simply receives nothing, silently and by design, rather than an automation guessing at how to reach them. On top of that, every customer send has to say up front whether it's a normal service message or marketing; marketing can't reach someone by text until they've actually opted in, and a missing opt-in always counts as no, never as yes.

Starting from a ready-made automation

Rather than building from a blank rule, the Automations tab offers a small gallery of ready-made ones you can turn on: an appointment reminder emailed to homeowners the morning before their visit, a nudge to follow up on an estimate that's been sitting for a few days, a note to whoever runs your storm or canvassing leads so a new one gets called back within the hour, a daily recap of the branch's numbers, and requests for a review or a referral once a job reaches a stage you choose. Each one becomes a normal rule once you turn it on, so you can open and adjust it like anything you built from scratch.

Where automations are configured

Click your name in the top right, choose Settings under Company, and open the Automations tab. That page is both your list of rules and, once you have none, the gallery above. Reaching it at all takes Modify on Account; building a rule with a specific step, like sending a text, additionally takes whatever permission sending that text by hand would take.

Built-in safety limits

A few ceilings exist so a misconfigured rule can't run away: a rule that would trigger itself, or bounce between two rules that keep triggering each other, is caught and stopped rather than looping. A single rule, and the account as a whole, both have an hourly ceiling on how many times they can act, and a daily budget on billable actions like texts and emails, so a mistake costs a bounded amount rather than an unbounded one. Every one of these is written to the rule's own run history, so you can see exactly why a run did, or didn't, do anything.