Automations

Automations are available in OrderTrac to allow you to automate certain tasks such as sending a webhook, sending an email, or emailing a report.

Automations can be configured under Settings > Automations.

Automations consist of 2 parts: A trigger and an action.

Triggers

A trigger is the event that triggers the action. Available triggers currently include:

• Date/Time
• Sales order created
• Customer Created
• Customer Updated
  

Date + Time

If you want to perform an action at a specific date/time, such as every monday morning @ 8:00, or on the first day of every month at 6AM for example, you would choose the Date + Time trigger.

Select the days of the week, the dates of the month, and the times of day the trigger should trigger. If you want the trigger to hit every monday morning at 6am for example, check the Monday box, and select every date of the month since it doesn't mater what the date is, and check 6:00 AM.

If you want to run a report on the 1st of the month, you would check all the days of the week but only the 1 checkbox for the 1st day of the month.

If you check the Monday box and the 1 box under dates of the month, the trigger would only hit when the day is Monday AND the date is the 1st, which will not be very often.

Sales order created

This trigger is pretty self explanatory - this automation will be triggered each time a new sales order is created. There are a few options available though:

Sales order type - Set to Quote or Sale depending on which type you want to trigger this automation.

Trigger Delay - If you don't want the automation to trigger immediately after the sales order is created, you can add a delay. This is recommended since when a sales order is created, there usually aren't any items on the sales order yet and it could take some time before all items are added. For this reason, you could set the delay to 120 for example to wait 2 hours before this automation is triggered. This will give you time to complete the sales order.

Starting on - If you don't want this automation to trigger for all past sales orders, set the Starting on date to today to only trigger this automation for new sales orders created going forward, but not sales orders already created.

Customer Created, Customer Updated

This trigger is very similar to the Sales order created trigger. You can specify a trigger delay which allows you to control how soon this automation is triggered after the customer has been created or updated.

You can also specify a starting on date as well to limit the automation to customers created or updated on/after the starting on date. This automation is helpful for synchronizing your customers list in OrderTrac with a CRM platform.

Actions

The second important part to automations is the action. This is simply the "What" we are going to do when the automation is triggered.

Send Webhook

This action simply sends a message to the provided URL. This is handy since many other service providers like CRMs support webhooks. Receiving a webhook can trigger an automation on their end, such as updating a contact, sending an email, etc. All you need is the webhook URL so you can enter it in the action URL field as seen below.

That is it, now any time this automation is triggered, OrderTrac will call this URL and provide any relevant data. For example, if the trigger is Sales order created, then the sales order data will be passed to that URL.

One very handy service you can use with this is Zapier. Zapier is a middleman that integrates with thousands of service providers, like Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Google sheets, and many more. Zapier supports receiving webhooks as a trigger to an automation you set up there. So for example, you can connect your CRM system to Zapier. Then you can set up an automation in Zapier so when it receives a webhook, it could pull the customer data out of the webhook and add that contact to your CRM.

So once you have a webhook set up in Zapier, you can add that webhook URL to your automation in OrderTrac, when opens up the door to connect to thousands of integrations that zapier supports.

Email Report

The next type of action support is emailing a report. This is handy since it allows you to send any report available in OrderTrac on an automated basis.

Just select the Email Report action and select all the available parameters to specify which report to send, any report parameters, recipient email, etc. See this article for more detailed instructions on automated emails.

Send Email

This action is handy if you simply want to send an email as the action. This could be to set an email that is sent to a specific recipient each time a new sales order quote is created, etc. For example, if you want to follow up with a customer 24 hours after a quote is created, set the trigger to Sales Order Created, type to quote, and set the delay to 24 hours (1440 minutes).

This is it! One you have set up an automation, Save the automation and click Test if you want to try it out. Don't forget to give it a good name and description so you can easily identify this automation.