The XRay.Tech Blog

No-code automations are a great way to save time and make your workflows more consistent. But sometimes, a simple linear automation doesn’t cut it. In real-world situations, you may need to accommodate variable inputs and multiple scenarios. 

In Zapier, Paths let you build more flexible automations that will perform different actions based on a specific variable inside of your automation. 

Adding a little conditional logic to your Zaps with Paths will make your automated workflows much more adaptable to your everyday work. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to get started with Paths with a quick and easy example. 

Building an Automated Email Follow-up for Website Contacts

In our example, we’ll create a simple Zap that will send an email to anyone who has reached out to work with us through our Webflow site.

The content of the reply will change based on the information the respondent provided when they filled out the Contact form. 

Our Contact form includes a dropdown selection for “Service Type” with three options: Project, Membership, and Other.

We’ll send one message for “Project”, one for “Membership”, and a default message for “other”. 

Before you can add paths, you just need to have a trigger to start your Zap. In our example, our Zap will run whenever a new response is recorded in this Webflow form. 

Adding Paths to Your Zapier Automation

Building the First Path

To build the first path, add a new action, and click on “Path”.

Zapier will now generate two blank paths, labeled “Path A” and “Path B”. Click on “Edit” to edit the first Path (Path A).

Fill in a name for this path, and make sure it’s descriptive. It will be much easier to maintain your automation later if you know what each path does. In our example, this will be the “project” path, so we’ll just call it “Project”. 

Setting a Rule for your Path

Now, you need to set a rule. The automation will only continue down this path if the data it’s processing matches this rule.

In our example, the content in Service Type should exactly match the word “Project”.

Once you’ve set your rule, click continue to test it and make sure it works.

Before you continue, you should also make sure to test some data that shouldn’t match this rule.

For instance, in our example, we want to make sure that this path will run when the Service Type is “Project”, but we also want to make sure it won’t run for any other type.

So we’ll go back to the trigger step to choose a different piece of data to work with, and test the rule again. 

And just as we hoped, the path wouldn’t have run, because this data has a “Membership” service type. 

Adding Actions to the Path

Once you’re confident that your rule works exactly as intended, you can move on and start adding the actions you want to perform in this path. 

In our example, we’ll send an email with some project-specific text. 

Once you’ve filled out all the required fields for your action, you can test the step.

Editing your Second Path

To edit your second path, close the first one, and click “Edit” on Path B. The second path will be set up largely the same as the first, so you can mostly refer to our instructions for the first path again.

In our example, we just want to make sure that the rule for this path will only accept requests that have the service type set to Memberships, so we’ll set up a rule accordingly. 

We’ll also include a membership-specific message in the email. 

Building a Default Path

Finally, you should set a default path for your automation to use in case it doesn’t meet the conditions for either of your first two paths.

Click “Add new path”, and once again we’ll follow the same steps to create this final path. 

However, Instead of creating a path for Service Type responses that exactly match “Other”, we’ll make sure this path can be a catch-all for anything else. Having a default option is a good way to ensure that your automation will run properly no matter what. 

We’ll set this path to run if the text in Service Type doesn’t match Project, AND doesn’t match Membership.

With this rule, this path will run if the user entered “Other”, or if they somehow managed to enter something else in the field. It also gives us a usable default response if we add other service types to the form. 

Once you’ve set up your default path, test your automation a few times with some different data to make sure that every path works. 

Additional Tips for Using Paths

Here a few other things you should be aware of while using paths:

• You can only make 5 paths per path module in Zapier. 

• You also can’t add any actions after a path module. 

• You can nest paths within other paths, although we’d recommend Sub-Zaps instead.

Using Paths to Make More Useful Automations

Now you’re all set to start using Paths in Zapier. Paths will make your automations much more useful in real-world scenarios, and they’re very easy to set up. Just make sure to test the automation thoroughly and make sure that you’ve set up your rules correctly.

If you’d like to learn more about building no-code automated workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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If you’re looking at automation as a way to create workflow magic, you’re looking in the right place.  Automation is a great way to help your organization save time and get better results. 

But when you’re working with an automator or an automation consultant, it’s easy to fall into the trap of asking for a specific process rather than focusing on the result you want. 

Being highly prescriptive about the apps and functions involved might seem like the right approach to building an automation, but in this post, we’re going to explain why you’re better off focusing on the end result and leaving the technical decisions to your automation team. 

The Problem with Focusing on a Process

First, let’s consider a hypothetical workflow that you might want to automate. 

Let’s say you’re currently gathering responses from your website’s contact form in a Google sheet, and then sending each new contact an email. Then, you keep notes in that same Google Sheet about the contact and how they respond to your outreach. 

When you go to automate this workflow, your first instinct may be to keep everything exactly the same, and simply automate steps whenever it’s possible. 

This is totally understandable. You know the current process works; you just want to use automation to make it faster and more consistent. 

So, you might go to an automation expert and give them some precise specifications to build this automated workflow. Something like this:

• Whenever a new contact is added to the Google Sheet, an email should be drafted and sent to the address they provided. 

• When the contact replies to the email, their original record in Google Sheets should be updated with the text and date of their reply. 

This spec sheet seems pretty straightforward on the surface, but there’s a big issue with building this automated workflow as specified.

Simply put, Google Sheets is the wrong tool for the job. It won’t work reliably for dynamically finding and updating information, and it won’t scale well if you want to start doing more with this automation. 

On a basic level, Sheets can be automated. It can connect with Zapier, Make, and other automation platforms, and it can work fine in certain circumstances. But if you want to regularly update existing records, something like Airtable is going to be a much more suitable foundation to build on. 

In many cases, it might just be better to execute this kind of a workflow with a CRM that’s designed for the task. 

This is just one specific instance, but it’s a good illustration of the larger problem: there are all sorts of automation pitfalls and best practices that you won’t be aware of. 

If you prescribe a specific list of apps and functions that your automation expert should use to build your automation, you’ll likely encounter a variety of technical issues and limitations – particularly as you build more automations on top of your first one. 

The Benefits of Focusing on a Result

If you focus on the result instead of the exact process, you’ll likely be much happier with the ultimate outcome. 

So what does a result-oriented request look like?

To keep using our Website Contact example, you might tell your automation team that you want to keep a record of every contact that reaches out to you, automatically send them an email, and update their record with a response. 

With that kind of a brief, you avoid unnecessary limitations that might make it more difficult for your automations to scale and function reliably. 

Your automation team would be able to recommend a CRM tool that is designed for this specific type of workflow, or a tool like Airtable, which could be customized for the purpose.

Let Your Automation Specialists Handle the Technical Work

If you’re still not convinced, it might be helpful to look at the situation from a different perspective. 

When something’s wrong with your car, you don’t tell your mechanic how to fix it. You tell them what you think is wrong with it, and describe how it should be working. 

You describe your experience with the car, not what’s happening under the hood. You trust that your mechanic will be able to diagnose the issue, and fix it accordingly. 

When you bring a workflow to an automation specialist, you should also trust in their expertise of the technical aspects of automation. 

Describe the problems you’re having with your current workflow, and describe what you want to be able to do. But be careful about dictating the technical specs up front. You might end up spinning your wheels and wondering why. 

Get the Best Automation Outcomes by focusing on the Results You Want

Ultimately, it can be difficult to leave your automation specs open-ended. It might feel like you’re giving up critical control of your process.

But if you trust your automation specialist as a partner and as a collaborator, you’ll be better off letting them make the technical decisions, while you focus on the end results of the automation. 

If you’d like to learn more about workflow automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Airtable is a great application for managing complex and dynamic databases. It integrates perfectly with automation platforms like Zapier and Make, and it also includes some native automation capabilities of its own. 

With Airtable automations, you can add or update records in your databases, send emails, and connect to popular apps like Google Docs or Slack. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to trigger Airtable automations with webhooks. 

Webhook triggers give you versatile control over when and how your automations run, and they let you trigger the same automation from totally different sources. 

You can set up webhook-triggered automations with just a few steps in Airtable. Just follow along with this tutorial and you’ll have your automation set up in minutes.

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Create an Automation in Airtable

Make a Custom Automation

Start by creating an automation in the Airtable base that you’d like to use. In our example, we’ll use a “Client directory” table in our tutorials base.

Click on “Automations”, then, click “Create Custom Automation”. 

Choose “When Webhook Received” and Copy the Webhook URL

You’ll see a list of triggers here, but to find Webhooks, you’ll need to click on “See all”. From this menu, select “When webhook received”.

In the “Properties” panel on the right, you’ll see a URL under “Configuration”. This is the URL that you’ll send your webhook to. Copy the URL, and save it for our next step. 

Send a Webhook

Use Zapier (or Another App) to Send a Webhook

Now, you’ll need to send a webhook from any app. In our example, we’ll use a simple Zapier automation. Note that you’ll need a premium Zapier account to use its webhooks steps.

Our Zap gets data from a Google sheets trigger, which we’ll send over to Airtable by adding a Webhooks step. 

Configure the Webhooks Step in Zapier

To configure the step, you just need to paste the URL we got from Airtable, choose a method, and provide some data.

The method will be POST, since you’re creating new data. 

Then, configure the data as key-value pairs. Each “key” will be the title of the piece of data, while the value will be the data itself. 

Once you’ve filled in all of our data, you can test the automation to send the webhook, and check Airtable to confirm that everything worked correctly. 

You should see all of the data that you sent with your webhook as Key-value pairs. 

Finish your Airtable automation

Add Actions to Your Automation

Now you can add steps to your Airtable automation to perform actions with the data you sent via webhook. You can add any steps that you’d like, or follow along with our example to see how Airtable can grab dynamic data from the webhook trigger. 

In our automation, we’ll create a new Airtable record with the data sent over. To do this, you just need to click on “Add action”, choose “Create Record”, and select the table you want to use.

Using Data from the Webhook

To create a new record with the webhook data, we’ll map each piece of data to the appropriate field. To do this, click on the blue plus sign. then choose “Webhook”. Click on “body” and then select the data you want to use.

Repeat that process for every field that you want to fill in.

Sending a Message in Slack

Finally, we’ll send a Slack message to make sure we’re notified of the new record. 

Click on “Add action”, and choose Slack under “Integrations”. Select “Send message”, and sign in to the Slack account you want to use.

Pick the user or channel that you want to send the message to, and compose the message.

Most of this message will be static text, but we’ll fill in some data from the webhook as well, using the same process as before. 

Click on the blue plus, choose webhook, then body, and insert the data you want to use. 

Then test the whole automation by clicking on “Test Automation”, and “run automation”.

You should see a Slack notification pop up, and if you check Airtable, there should be a new record with the data from your webhook. 

Building automations with webhooks

Now you’re all set to start building Airtable Automations with webhooks. Triggering your automations with webhooks is a great way to build versatile workflows that you can launch from any data source. 

If you’d like to learn more about building no-code automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Automation is growing fast. Businesses in every industry are adopting automation as they look for ways to become more efficient.

As more and more people are using automation and talking about it, there’s also quite a bit of misinformation and misconceptions going around.

In this post, we’ll address five of the most common automation myths that we’ve heard at XRay, and explain how automation really works. 

Myth #1: Automation is About Downsizing

Automation is not about firing people and replacing them with a few lines of code. 

Good automation is focused on supporting people, not replacing them. Workflow automation eliminates tedious robotic tasks, but it doesn’t take away your responsibilities. 

If an automation is built the right way, it will always include some vital human checkpoints. Human checkpoints are Critical moments in a workflow where you or your team can review what the automation is doing and choose whether or not to proceed.

By automating robotic tasks and maintaining human oversight, well-designed automations amplify the output of your team so they can accomplish more. They don’t eliminate the need for human involvement and human judgment.

Myth #2:  Anything can be automated

While you can automate a staggering array of workflows and applications, the truth is that not every process can - or should - be automated. 

You can only automate robotic tasks; tasks that don’t require human creativity, analysis, strategy, or thoughtfulness. For instance, you can’t automate the design and development of an entire website. But you can still automate the creation of a web page based on a template. 

Automation excels at performing repetitive, mindless tasks. Anything that essentially boils down to copying data from one spot and pasting it into another is an ideal candidate for automation.

On the other hand, anything that requires human ingenuity can’t be completely automated, which is where those human checkpoints we referred to earlier come into play. 

You may be able to automate certain steps of creative or analytical processes, but you’ll still need a human running the show.

Myth #3: Automation reduces quality of Output

A good automation doesn’t result in a worse output. 

It’s understandable that you may be afraid of one-size-fits-all automations ruining your workflows. We’ve all had horrible experiences with automated customer support, and you might think that no-code automation would face similar issues. 

But while simplistic and poorly built automations might not deliver the quality you’re looking for, a well-built automation can accommodate all sorts of different scenarios and inputs. 

In some cases, your workflow may be too complicated to automate - as we just mentioned while addressing Myth #2, not everything can be automated. 

But if you can automate a process, the result will actually be more consistent.

An automation won’t forget to perform certain tasks, or make simple mistakes like typos. It will perform the workflow the exact same way every time, with a reliability that you could never expect from a person. 

As with any software, there will be some technical errors every now and again, but these won’t be frequent. And ultimately, it will be far easier to notice and fix an automated error than it would be to discover and address each unique human error.

If you’re worried that automation will result in a lower quality output, you can rest easy. With well-designed automation, you can actually look forward to more consistency and reliability, without sacrificing quality. 

Myth #4: Automation Limits the Tools You Can Use

Next, let’s tackle one of the most inaccurate myths we often come across: that automation limits the software tools you can use.

In most cases, this just isn’t true.

The beauty of no-code and low-code automation is that it works with nearly any software stack imaginable. Platforms like Zapier and Make support thousands of apps right out of the box, including the most popular and useful software out there. 

Even if your apps aren’t natively supported, you can always create custom integrations for them as long as they have an API - and most modern software does. Apart from some very rare exceptions, you can use whatever tools you want with automation. 

Myth #5: Automation is Cheap OR Automation is Expensive

Finally, we’re going to cover two closely related automation myths: that automation is very cheap, AND that automation is very expensive. 

In our experience at XRay, many people aren’t sure what to expect when it comes to the cost of automation.

In some cases, people think that automation is as cheap as a small monthly subscription.In other instances, people are worried that they’ll be spending as much on automation as they would on a fully custom piece of software.

While both extremes might be true under certain circumstances, the reality is that automation typically comes at a moderate cost - but brings massive benefits for every dollar you spend.

A small monthly subscription is all you need to get started with Zapier or Make, but if you want to really transform your business with automation, you’ll either need to spend a lot of your team’s time on building automations, or you’ll need to work with a company like XRay. 

In general, we help companies to automate their workflows for about the cost of one employee’s salary annually. For this price, we provide our entire team’s diverse expertise and build automated systems that support every department at your company.

If you were to try to hire similar talent, you’d probably need to bring several new staff members on board.

So while automation can require a significant investment, the return is more than worth it.  

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What You Can Really Expect from Automation

That concludes our rundown of the top automation myths. To sum it up:

• Automation is NOT about downsizing;

• NOT everything can be automated;

• Automation WON’T reduce the quality of your team’s output;

• You CAN automate with nearly any modern software;

• And finally, automation isn’t dirt cheap, but like most things, you get what you pay for. 

If you’d like to learn more about how no-code automation can transform your business, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

In a highly competitive marketplace, companies need every advantage at their disposal to distinguish themselves. 

With SaaS tools having cemented themselves an integral part of nearly every company's operations, workflow automation is rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for creating efficiencies at work. 

If you’ve been on the fence about adopting automation, now is the time to commit. 

Automation is Growing Fast

Companies in every industry are rapidly adopting workflow automation. In a 2021 survey, Hubspot found that 76% of marketing companies were already using automation, and ultimately, this number is only going to keep growing. 

According to a recent Gartner report, companies have shifted their focus to operational efficiency in the wake of economic uncertainty, and they predict that over 70% of large enterprises will adopt multiple automation initiatives in the next few years.

To put it bluntly, even if you’re not using automation yet, there’s a good chance your competitors are. 

The Benefits of Automation for your Company

Of course, we’re not just encouraging you to follow the crowd. 

Regardless of what your competitors are doing, workflow automation will provide transformative benefits for your company. When you start automating your robotic tasks, you can look forward to saving a lot of time and ensuring a more consistent output from your newly automated processes. 

The exact results can vary, and will depend on your specific circumstances. But you can always count on seeing substantial time savings and improving the quality of your team’s output.

How XRay Has Saved Time and Improved Outcomes for our Members 

At XRay, our members typically save dozens of hours each week with the help of automated workflows, and they see more consistent and reliable results.

For example, XRay worked with mental health educators Journey to automate their system for onboarding new accounts.

The automation saves an hour for every client they onboard, and completely eliminates account provisioning as a task for the product team, freeing up valuable engineering resources. 

While results can vary significantly, workflow automation is guaranteed to give your team some of their time back, and grow to be a massive strategic advantage. In turn, automation can actually become a vital recruiting tool for your company too. 

Attracting the Best Talent with Mindful Work

Right now, employers have to compete to secure the best talent. The job market is hot, and even offering generous compensation might not be enough to hire and keep the best candidates. 

You’ll need to create a culture and environment that makes your company stand out to potential recruits. 

Use Automation to Support People, Not Replace Them

Workflow automation will help you to establish a workplace culture that promotes mindful work, and lets the robots handle all the tedious, repetitive tasks.

While there’s often been concern that automation will replace humans, the reality is that automated workflows can be designed to support people as they work. According to a report by Wilson Towers Watson, over half of employers are already seeing that the main goal of automation is to “augment human performance”, not to downsize staff. 

Ultimately, software developers want to spend their time developing software. Designers want to spend their time designing. Whatever role they’re in, talented employees want to focus on their core competencies, not on copy-paste busywork that’s better suited to software. 

Automation will enable your current team and your future hires to focus as much of their time as possible on using their unique skills.

By cutting out the distractions of tedious robotic tasks, workflow automation makes your company an ideal workplace for elite talent. 

Start Automating Your Workflows Today

The best time to start automating your company’s workflows is right now. 

Think about the repetitive tasks that you or your team are performing every day, or every week. How often are you just moving data from one app into another? Robotic tasks like these are ideal candidates for automation. 

Take a look at the tutorials on our YouTube channel, or reach out to us to start automating these tasks. You’ll be able to automatically respond to inbound leads, create presentations, onboard clients, organize and manage your documents, and a whole lot more. 

You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for automation tips and tutorials. 

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Automatically creating projects, tasks, and clients in a time-tracking app like Harvest is a great addition to any onboarding workflow. It will help you to save some time and make your onboarding process much more consistent, as clients and projects are created instantly.

In this post, we’ll give you an overview of what you can automate in Harvest with Make, and show you an example of a scenario you could build.

Automate Nearly any Harvest Action with Make

Nearly anything you can do in Harvest can be automated in Make. 

If you open up Make and create a Harvest module, you can see a huge list of options for creating and editing data.

You can work with clients, contacts, projects, invoices, expenses, time entries, and users. 

And if the action you want to automate isn’t listed here, it’s most likely covered by the last option in the list: make an API call.

With an API call module, you can query Harvest’s API to perform any action that it allows. It takes a little more work than using the prebuilt modules, but you can easily find the information you need to set up this module in Harvest’s API docs.

And in the rare case that your actions aren’t supported by the API call module either, you can always create an HTTP request to automate an action.

But for the vast majority of cases, the prebuilt modules and API calls will be all that you need. 

Example scenario: Create a Client and a Project with Airtable Data

Now, we’ll walk you through building an example scenario that automates some Harvest actions in Make.

This scenario will take data from Airtable and use it to create a new client and a new project associated with that client. Then, we’ll add a little conditional logic to the scenario so it can either find an existing client, or create a new one as needed. 

Get Data from Airtable (or Another Source)

First, you need to get some data for your scenario to work with. In our example, we’ll use an Airtable base, but you could also use a CRM or any other data source you prefer.

This Airtable view shows new Projects recently added to the base. Make will watch this view and run whenever there’s a new entry.

You just need to indicate the base, table, and view you want to use. Test this initial step by selecting ‘Choose where to start’, ‘choose manually’, and picking a record. 

Then, click run once, and you should see that Make found a record. Throughout this tutorial, you can keep using this same method to test the scenario. 

Create a Client

Next, create a new Harvest module, and select “Create a Client”. There are only three options we need to fill out here: Name, Address, and Currency.

Fill in Name and Address with Data from Airtable, andl set currency to always be USD by typing “USD” into the field.

There’s one more option hidden behind “show advanced settings”. You can set the client as Active, Archived, or Empty. 

Once this step is configured, test again. Open up Harvest, and you can confirm that the new client is there. 

Before you proceed to the next step, delete the client to avoid any duplicates or errors. 

Create a Project with an API Call Module

Next, we’re going to have our scenario create a new project. We could use the “Create a Project” module, but we might want to set some projects to Fixed Fee.  

In the pre-built “Create a Project” module, there’s no option for that. So instead, we’re going to select “Make an API call”.

Whenever making an API call or using the HTTP module, refer to the relevant docs to find out what information you need to provide. You can find Harvest’s API docs here, and you can generally find API docs for any app with a quick Google search.

With the documentation handy, you can start filling in the API call module. You can also refer to the screenshot below for an example of a completed module. 

URL and Method

As the helper text in Make indicates, you just need to add a relative path in the URL field, rather than a full URL. Enter “projects”, and select POST as the method.

Headers

In the headers, you should see that a key-value pair for “Content Type” is already filled in. You can leave that as-is, and add a new key-value pair for authorization.

The key will be “Authorization”, and the value will be “Bearer”, followed by an access token. To get your harvest access token, go to the “Developers” section of your Harvest account, create a new token, and copy it. 

Then paste it in after “Bearer”. Just be sure to leave one space between “Bearer” and the start of your token.

Query String

If we were making a GET request, we could use a Query String to filter the results, but we can just leave it blank in this POST request. So we’ll skip that for now and fill out the body of our request.

Body

The text here needs to follow JSON formatting, and include every required attribute. To see which fields are required for the “Project” object, we can check Harvest’s API docs. 

As you’re filling out the body, you can use data from previous steps for dynamic content. So in this case, our Scenario will fill in the unique Client ID and project name each time it runs, rather than using a static value. 

Finally, we’ll add the two optional attributes that we couldn’t access in the prebuilt module: “Is_fixed_fee” , and “fee”. We’ll fill in both of those with data from Airtable. Test the scenario again to make sure everything looks good. 

Over in Harvest, we should see that the project was created, and it’s already set to “fixed fee”.

Optional: Add a Router to Improve Your Scenario

This scenario is a good start, but it’s not very flexible. What happens if we add a new project to this Airtable base for an existing client?

The automation will try to create the client again, and encounter an error. We need to add logic to handle likely use cases, and there’s a very easy way to do this.

After the “create a client” step, add a module to update the Airtable record that triggered the automation to run. Then, add the Harvest ID into this “Harvest ID” column. 

Then, add a router from the “flow control” menu. Set one path to run if the Harvest ID field in Airtable is blank, and have it create a new client accordingly. 

If the ID field is not empty, then the automation should run the second path, using the provided ID to find the correct client.

Conditional logic like this can be a little tedious to set up, but it makes your automations much more useful in the real world.

Automate Your Onboarding with Make and Harvest

Now you’re all set to start automating your Harvest projects in Make. Between Make’s pre-built modules and customizable API calls, you can automate nearly any workflow you want. 

If you’d like to learn more about building no-code and low-code automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

At XRay.Tech, one of our main goals is to automate common tasks that every business needs to perform on a day-to-day basis. 

While every company has a unique focus, we all have to conduct many of the same processes just to keep our businesses running. Every company has to run payroll for their employees; every company has to interview new candidates; and every company needs to draft and send contracts, proposals, and other documents.

In this post, we’ll explain why you should consider automating your document creation workflows, and we’ll show you what the finished automation might look like. 

Why automate proposals?

Save Time

The most obvious benefit to proposal and contract automation is that it will save you some time. This is true with just about any automated workflow, and it’s certainly the case with automated documents.

Depending on the length of your contracts and proposals, you’ll probably save about 10-15 minutes per document. That’s not a lot on its own, but it will add up fast if you’re churning out a high volume. For instance, if you’re sending out NDAs every week to potential recruits and vendors, you could potentially save an hour or more each week.  

But even if you don’t send out many contracts and proposals, document automation still has some great benefits.

Reduce Errors

With automatically constructed documents, your error rate will be virtually zero. You won’t need to manually search for all of the placeholders you need to fill in, or make sure that you have the right capitalization settings in Find & Replace.

The automation will fill in all the blanks for you, making sure that everything is done consistently and correctly every time. 

Track Key Metrics 

In addition to saving time and creating a more consistent process, automating your proposals and contracts also makes it very simple to start tracking the workflow and its results.

With just a couple steps in your automations, you can easily keep track of how many documents you’re sending out, how long it takes to get them approved and signed, and more. 

And everything can be tracked in the software of your choice - Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Airtable, or any other database app you prefer.

How it works

Send Proposals, Contracts, and other Docs with a Simple Form

Using a proposal automation is very simple. All you have to do is fill in a quick survey with the information you need to update.

Just fill in the form with a few names and dates, click submit, and the automation will generate the document for you. 

If you’d like, you can also configure the automation to email the proposal out right away, or use an app like Docusign to get an official signature. 

Create Each Doc with a Customized Template

Before you can use the automation, you’ll need to create a template for the document in an app like Google docs. 

Identify the information you want to update in each proposal, and replace them with variables that an automation app like Zapier can recognize. 

Start Building the Automation

If you’d like more detail, you can check out this tutorial for a step-by-step guide. But to keep it simple, you really just need three things to set up a proposal automation:

• A document to use as a template, with all of your variables correctly identified

• A form that can collect answers and trigger the creation of new documents

• An automation app like Zapier to connect the form to the template. 

You can use all sorts of apps to build an automated workflow like this: Google Docs, Zapier, Typeform, Airtable, Google Forms, and more. As is usually the case with no-code automation, you can use pretty much any software you’d like to set up this workflow. 

How to get started

If you’d like to build this automation yourself, you can check out XRay’s full tutorial on our YouTube channel or on our blog. 

If you’re looking for an agency to build this automation and more for your team, you can also contact XRay at our site linked below to discuss options and work with us.

Start Drafting and Sending Automated Documents Today

Drafting and sending documents like contracts and proposals can be a very repetitive process, making it an easy target for automation.

When you automate your documents, you’ll save time, reduce errors, and make it much easier to track the workflow. This is a very easy automation to get started with, so we encourage you to check out the tutorials we’ve linked and give it a shot.

If you’d like to learn more about automating your business processes, be sure to check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Notion is an outstanding tool for creating highly customizable documents and databases. With a robust feature set and easy usability, Notion is a great choice for maintaining key information and content at your company.

With some simple no-code automation, you can make Notion even more useful.

Automatically creating documents can be a great way to ensure that you keep your workspace organized and up to date.

Creating Notion pages with Make is pretty straightforward, but there are few pitfalls to watch out for.

Read on, and we’ll show you how it works step by step.

Connecting a Notion Database to Make

First, you need a Notion database to add items to. If you don’t have one ready, then make one that you can use as a test. The content of the database isn’t important; you can include any fields and information that you’d like. 

To use a Notion database in Make, you just need to make sure that Make has access to the database. To do this, you’ll need to add Make as an integration in Notion. 

Click on “Settings & Members”, and select “Integrations”.

Click on “Develop your own integrations” to create a new integration, and give it a name. You can also give it a unique image to make it easier to identify. 

Once you create the integration, copy the token. 

When you start making your scenario in Make, you can paste this token to connect your Notion account. 

Then, go back to your database, click on Share, and “invite” the integration you just made from the list. 

That’s all you need to connect the accounts. Just note that if your database is within another page, you’ll need to make sure that parent page is shared as well

Set up a Trigger Module of Your Choice

You can start this automation with any module that you want to use to gather data.

In our example, we’re using a table in Airtable that collects responses to our ‘Contact Us’ form, so our automation will run every time there’s a new record in this view.

The scenario will collect data from every field in the Airtable record, which we’ll use to create a new database item in Notion.

Create a Database Item with Notion Module

With your trigger module all set, add a Notion module to your scenario. Select “Create database item”, and enter the Database ID. 

To find an ID, just open the database in your browser. The database ID is the string of characters after your workspace, and before “?v”. If you’re not part of a workspace in Notion, then the ID will start after “notion.so/”

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Give Make a moment to find your database, and then map your data in the fields that come up. We’ll map each of our fields from Airtable to a corresponding one in Notion, and then we’ll test the first two modules in the scenario.

You may have noticed that we don’t have a property in the Notion database for the ‘Request’ field. 

We could have just created a property and mapped “Request” to it, but since it’s a paragraph of text, we want to add it as page content instead. 

Append Page content 

To add page content to a database item, add a new Notion module, and choose “Append a Page Content”.

Then, enter the “Database Item ID” from the previous module in the field labeled “Page ID”.

Now, you can add content blocks one at a time. For each block, choose a content block type, such as Heading 1, paragraph, etc. You also need to set a type for the content within that block. Here you can choose from text, mention, or equation.

We’re going to add a static H1 that just says “Request Content”, and then we’ll add a Paragraph which contains the text of the request that we retrieved in our Airtable module. 

We’ll run this scenario once to test (making sure to delete the results of the previous test first), and we can see that the database item has been updated with some page content.

Creating Pages

Creating pages is very similar to creating database items, so we won’t run through the whole process again. Instead we’ll just take a quick look at the “Create a Page” module and some of the key differences

With the Create a Page module, you just add the ID of the parent page, and fill in the required fields. 

You’ll note that you don’t have access to many properties when creating a page, so you’ll have to add most of your information as Content Objects, which can be pretty tedious to set up.

This is why we generally prefer to create database items instead, and simply map the information to database properties. 

But whichever way you want to go, Make has you covered.

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Establish consistency with automated documents

Now you’re all set to start creating Notion pages with your Make scenarios. Automated document creation is a great way to make sure you’re keeping track of important data, and it’s something we use a lot at XRay. With automation, you can ensure that your important documents are always created and stored in exactly the same way.

If you’d like to learn more about building no-code automations with platforms like Make and Zapier, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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When business leaders consider workflow automation, they often tend to think about saving time above all else.

While time-saving is certainly a key benefit of automation, its full impact extends much further.

Automation lets you track your workflows in detail, making your processes more consistent, and making data visualization easy and effective. In many cases, it will make rich data visualization possible for the first time. 

In this post, we’ll explain how no-code automation lets you gather extensive data on your workflows, and enables you to build a business intelligence dashboard.

Track Every Automated Action

Any action that you automate is an action that you can track. 

Without automation, your team is constantly performing critical tasks that aren’t being tracked, monitored, or logged in any consistent way. 

General tasks might be captured in an app like Asana or Trello, while your inbound lead funnel is managed through a CRM like Hubspot or Pipedrive. All of your team’s activity is scattered among several different apps, and some of their key progress and decisions won’t be logged at all.

You could always assign people on your team to track all of this information, but that would mean hours of manual work, and lots of errors and inconsistencies in your data. 

When you automate a workflow, you turn it into a series of events that are inherently tracked and logged. Every time an automation sends an email, creates a document, or updates a record, you can see that event in the automation platform’s history.

And while platforms like Zapier and Make might not be the best place to view workflow data, it just takes one more automated step to store key metrics in Airtable or Google Sheets. 

Automating a workflow isn’t just a method for saving time. It’s also the first step in gathering key data about your company and business processes.

Make Your Workflows More Consistent

When a process is fully manual, variation is inevitable. Different people will perform the tasks in different ways, and even if your team generally conducts the process the same way, nobody is perfect, and everyone will make errors from time to time. 

The inherent inconsistency in manual processes makes it much more difficult to track your workflows and their outcomes. 

When you automate a process, you know that all of its components are performed the exact same way every single time. 

For example, if you’ve built automations to support your Project Delivery process, you know that your clients will always receive their finished projects exactly how you planned it.

Every client will get a similar email based on the same template; every client will have a Google Drive link for the finished assets; every client will get a Slack message once delivery is complete.

When your delivery process is conducted manually, having a database that says you’ve delivered 10 projects doesn’t necessarily mean much. You may have conducted delivery 10 different ways, achieving 10 different sets of results.

Once you automate the process, you know what the ‘delivered’ datapoint means. While manual project delivery might change every time it happens, automated project delivery will conduct the exact steps that you designed, every time. 

In essence, automating a process also defines the process as a datapoint, setting you up to gather useful data and meaningful insights into your team’s performance of a process.

Automated Business Intelligence

By making your processes consistent and tracking key metrics, automation enables you to set up a robust Business Intelligence dashboard. 

Automated KPI tracking and data processing doesn’t end with dumping everything into Google Sheets or Airtable. With no-code automation, any data you want can be sent over to apps like BigQuery or AWS for analysis and visualization. 

You can get weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports without having to lift a finger. You’ll see key trends and takeaways at a glance, and you can dig deeper to find insights that will influence your most important decisions.

Automating your systems ensures that your data isn’t locked into any specific app. You won’t have to track your leads in your CRM, or follow employee progress in a task management app. You can see and compare any data you want in any app you want. And all of the syncs and transfers can be configured to run automatically. 

Automation lets you capture every workflow, every outcome, and every action that you want to track. It lets you surface critical insights about how you and your team are getting your work done, and enables you to plan your next moves. 

The key is being specific and intentional with what questions you want your data to answer, which is something we’ll address in a future blog post.

Discover key insights with no-code automation

While automation is typically discussed as a tool for saving time, some of its most useful and transformative benefits lie in its ability to gather clean data. 

With no-code automation, you can make your processes more consistent, easily gather KPIs, and surface all of the information you need in Business intelligence reports. Ultimately, if you want to analyze your company’s performance, no-code automation is the best place to start. 

If you’d like to learn more about how no-code automation can support your business, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Workflow automations depend on high-quality data. After all, automation platforms like Zapier and Make are essentially just tools for copying and transforming your data. 

As we covered in a previous post, using messy and redundant datasets in your workflows can cause a variety of errors and unintended results. 

In this post, we’ll share some tips for gathering useful, organized data for your no-code automations. We’ll also share a few techniques you can use to clean up your existing datasets.  

Establish a consistent method for creating new data

As we discussed in the last video, inconsistent data is a huge problem when you’re building automations. 

One way to make sure that your dataset contains consistent and complete records is to designate a single approved method for adding new data. 

When your team needs to create a new record for a client or a project, there shouldn’t be any question about which app to use, or which table to add it to.

For example, you could create an Airtable form designed to let your team add a new client to your directory. Share a link to the form in your documentation, and make it clear to your team that they should always use this form to create a new client record. 

In the form, you can set all of the necessary fields to “required”, so you won’t have to worry about ending up with a bunch of incomplete entries that will break your automations in the future. 

It can require a little bit of documentation and training, but making sure that your team always adds new data in the same way, will help ensure that your databases are consistent and complete as you start to automate. 

Keep each dataset in just one app

Whenever possible, we recommend keeping each of your datasets within one app. Every problem caused by bad data is only made worse when your records are spread across different apps that aren’t connected. 

To that end, you should always try to pick an app that suits the data you’re trying to store and access. For most data, spreadsheet-based apps like Airtable and Google Sheets are appropriate, but if you’re managing a set of documents, you might want to use software like Notion instead. 

Whichever app you choose for your dataset, maintaining it all in one app will make it much easier to keep everything clean and consistent. 

However, it’s not always possible to store all of your records for a given dataset in a single app. 

No software is perfect, and there might be times when you’ll need some features that your preferred app just doesn’t offer. 

Sync your databases with Unito and Coupler if you need to use multiple apps

If you need to manage your dataset in multiple apps, then you can use synchronization tools like Unito and Coupler to at least make sure that any parallel records stay up to date. 

By setting up automatic syncs, you can make sure that any updates you make to a table in Notion are reflected in a similar spreadsheet in Airtable or Google Sheets. 

Under any circumstances, limiting your database software to as few apps as possible will help you to keep everything organized. But when you need to branch out into different software, synchronization tools will let you avoid manual data entry and the errors that come with it.

Use simple automated tools to clean up your existing data

The first two tips we mentioned here are great for making sure that your new records are standardized, but what can you do about your existing data?

Ultimately, you can always salvage a messy dataset with some clean-up work. It can be tedious, but a thorough audit will help you to get rid of duplicates and update incomplete records

Fortunately, you don’t have to devote hours to tidying up your records manually. There are several apps, plugins, and native features in common apps that make it much faster to organize your spreadsheets.

For instance, you can use the “Dedupe” app in Airtable. As you might have guessed from the name, Dedupe is an app that helps you to find and delete any duplicate records that you have in Airtable. 

Just click on Apps, select “Add App”, and search for Dedupe to add it to your base. 

Alternatively, if you’re working in Google Sheets, you can use a native feature to accomplish a similar result. Just click on “Data” in the toolbar, mouse over “Data cleanup” and select “Remove duplicates”. 

The app will then walk you through the process of reviewing and deleting any duplicate records in your spreadsheet. 

While it’s always best to start with clean data in the first place, it’s never too late to go back and improve a messy dataset. With the help of some native features and plugins, your database apps can help you clean up the data you already have.

Lay the groundwork for great automations with clean data

Gathering good data is essential for building effective and functional automations. Creating data with a consistent process and keeping your records in just one or two apps is a great way to start, and if you need to clean up data you’ve already collected, Airtable and Google Sheets have some simple tools that will let you easily clear out duplicates. Once your datasets are in good shape, you’ll be ready to use them in your automations. 

If you’d like to learn more about building no-code and low-code automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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As you build more automated workflows, documentation becomes a very important discipline to maintain. Keeping a handful of Zaps up and running is relatively simple, but once you’ve built several automated workflows, you’ll need a documentation system to keep track of everything. 

In this post, we’ll quickly explain the difference between logging and documentation, and we’ll share our best practices for documenting your automations for yourself and other automators.

Documentation vs. logging

First, let’s clarify the difference between documentation and logging.

Documentation consists of descriptions of what an automation does, and how to use it.

Logging consists of metadata generated when your automation runs.

Both are crucial for tracking and maintaining your automations, but in this video, we’ll be focusing on documentation. We’ll tackle logging in a future video.

The Key Benefits of Documentation

One of the main purposes of documenting your no-code/low-code automations is to ensure that any automator who needs to contribute to your automations understands how they work. 

Even if you’re a solo automator, detailed documentation can come in handy. An automation you built last week may still be fresh in your mind, but when it runs into an error two months from now, will you still remember how it all works well enough to fix the bugs?

Creating documentation for every automation you build involves a little extra work in the short-term, but it ensures that you won’t need to rely on your memory to fix your automations in the long-term. 

With that in mind, there are two main ways you should document your automations: descriptions and diagrams.

Custom Titles: Documenting Within Each Automation

As a basic step towards useful documentation, you should make sure to add helpful context within each automation you build.

Every Zap you create in Zapier, or every Scenario you create in Make should include as much information as possible about how it works. 

Give each automation a descriptive title, and whenever possible give each step or action a descriptive name as well. 

Instead of naming a Zap “New Contacts”, call it something like “Add New Website Contacts to Directory in Airtable”. 

Instead of using the default names for steps like “Create Record”, go with something more descriptive like “Create a Record for the New Contact in the Directory table” (note: some platforms don’t support custom names for automation steps).

Use your titles to illustrate the purpose of each automated action, and to make it clear where data is coming from and going to.This way, any automator you work with can understand the basics of your automations just by opening up them in Zapier, Make, or another automation platform. 

Building Detailed Guides with Technical Documentation

Ultimately, there are limits to what you can document with automation titles alone.For more complex automations, you’ll need some external documentation to really explain the nuts and bolts of important technical decisions. 

Technical documentation typically takes two forms: descriptions and diagrams. 

Descriptive Documentation

For detailed descriptions, you can use apps like Notion or Google Docs to write summaries of what each automation does and how it works.

In these docs, be sure to include salient details like the logic and technology the automation uses, any common problems it encounters, planned updates, links to relevant API docs and databases, and more. 

Treat these docs as all-encompassing “how-to” guides that can train any automator to use, troubleshoot, and update your automations. 

Your coworkers and other collaborators should be able to understand the goal of the automation, even if they didn’t build the automation themselves. 

BPMN Diagrams

To further illustrate how your automations work, you can use diagrams to add a visual component to your documentation. We’d recommend using Lucidchart to make a BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) diagram.

A BPMN Diagram will let you chart each step visually, and will clearly demonstrate the flow of data from one app to the next. It will also help you to distinguish automated actions from manual steps at a glance. 

Preparing for the future with documented automations

Thorough documentation will make it much easier for you to keep using and maintaining your automated workflows in the long term. With detailed titles, descriptive guides, and simple diagrams, you can ensure that anyone on your team can work on your automations in the future. 

If you’d like to learn more about building and maintaining no-code automated workflows, be sure to check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Airtable is one of the best database apps to use with your no-code and low-code automations. With customizable filters and views, Airtable lets you organize and manage your data with flexibility and precision as you build automated workflows.

One of Airtable’s most useful features for no-coders is the simple Form view option. Form views let you add records to an Airtable database by filling in a prompt for each field.

Forms are a great way to let colleagues and clients contribute to a database, and they help you ensure that you don’t have any incomplete records that could cause errors in your automations. They’re easy to set up, and they’re a very useful tool for any automator to have at their disposal. 

At XRay, Form views are one of our most common methods for triggering automations. In this post, we’ll show you everything you need to know to start using them. 

Required Software

All you’ll need for this tutorial is Airtable. We’d also recommend using an automation platform like Zapier or Make to see how Airtable Forms can trigger an automation to run. 

Making a Form View

First, open up an Airtable base that you’d like to add a Form to. In our example, we’re going to add a form to our Client directory. 

In the “Create” section in the bottom left corner, click on “Form”, and give your Form view a name. Airtable will create a new view that organizes all of your fields as questions in a form. 

Editing the Form

From here, you can edit your form however you’d like. By default, Airtable will include every field as a question, and it will use the field name as the text of the question. To remove questions from the form, just click and drag them into the “fields” section on the left. 

You can also change the text of each question, and add helper text if you’d like to provide more information.

Note that all of your edits will only apply to the Form view. Removing a field from the form won’t delete it from the base or other views. Changing the question text won’t change the names of your fields either. 

You can customize your form freely without worrying about messing up the rest of your data. 

Once you’ve tweaked your form as desired, you can fill it out to add a record to your table.

Filling out the Form

However, you can’t fill out the form in this editable view. You can enter text into the fields, but you can’t actually submit your answers and create a new record.

Instead, you’ll need to click on “Share form”, and copy the link, or just click on the “Open Form” button. Now, you can answer each prompt and click submit. 

If you return to your Airtable base, you should see a record with your responses.

Triggering an Automation with an Airtable Form

Both Zapier and Make have the option to trigger an automation whenever a new record is added to an Airtable view. 

The main thing to keep in mind when you’re using Airtable forms to trigger an automation is that records don’t appear in the form view itself. You’ll need to designate another view (like a Grid) as the view that will trigger your automations.

In our automation, we’ll make a new Grid view called “New contacts” that we can use to trigger an automation. We’ll add a filter so it only includes posts that are a week old or newer.

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In Zapier, we’ll create a new Zap, and set the trigger to “New Record in Airtable”.

After we select our bae and table, we can see our two grid views, but not the form view. We’ll select the “New Contacts” view as the one that Zapier should check for new records. 

When we test the trigger, we can see the data we just submitted in the form. Now we can continue and build any automation we’d like with this data. 

Enable Automations and Let Anyone Contribute to Your Databases

Airtable forms are a great way to let clients and team contribute to your databases without needing to grant them any sort of editing access. Once they submit an answer, you can also easily set up automations to use that data. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code and low-code automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Make (formerly Integromat) offers extensive low-code functionality, making it one of the best automation tools available if you’re looking to build more sophisticated workflows. 

In addition to a wide selection of pre-built modules for specific apps, Make also gives users several modules that can work with just about any software, like the HTTP module focused on sending requests to webhooks.  

Webhooks let you access an application’s API, transferring data that you can then use in another platform. With HTTP requests and Webhooks, you can connect your Make scenarios to additional automations in apps like Zapier or Airtable, 

In this post, we’ll show you how to send HTTP requests in your Make scenarios step-by-step. 

Create an HTTP Module

First, you’ll need to add an “HTTP” module in Make. 

Note: don’t select the “webhooks” module. The webhook module is designed for receiving requests, while the HTTP module is Make’s approach to sending requests. 

Search for “http”, select the appropriate module, and choose “Make a request”.

Configure the HTTP module

To fill in the URL and configure the rest of the module, you’ll need to consult the documentation for the app that you’re sending data to. 

Their documentation or support guides will show you the appropriate URL, and how the data needs to be configured.

For example, we’re going to send data to an Airtable webhook in order to trigger an Airtable automation. 

If we Google “Airtable webhooks”, we can easily find some relevant support docs. You could also search for “[your app] api”, or “[your app] docs” to find what you need.

Designate a URL to Send the Request To

Refer to your app’s documentation to find the target URL you need to send your request to. 

With Airtable, the docs indicate that we need to open a table, create an automation, and select “When Webhook Received” as the trigger. 

Then, we can see the URL we need in the “Automations” panel on the right hand side of the Airtable UI. We’ll copy it and paste it into our HTTP module in Make.

Select a REST API Method

Next, you’ll need to select an option from the Method menu. In most cases, you’ll need to choose “POST” to send data. 

If you’re curious about what these other options are for, here’s a quick rundown: 

• POST creates new data

• GET finds existing data

• PUT and PATCH are used to update data, and DELETE is used to delete data. 

You can check the docs to confirm which method to use, but if your goal is to create new data, you’ll probably want to use POST.

Fill in Headers and Query String as Needed

In many cases, you’ll need to add a header to authenticate your request, but in this case, authentication is already handled by connecting Airtable to Make, so we’ll leave Headers blank.

Adding a query string would let us filter results, but we won’t need one in this example. 

Complete the Body Type, Content Type, and Request Content Fields

Check your app’s documentation to find out how the body and content of your request need to be formatted. 

Airtable’s Docs specify that we need to format the content as a JSON object, so we’ll choose “Raw” as the Body type and “JSON” as the content type.

Now you need to fill out the “Request content” field with the data you want to send.

For our Airtable example, we need to use JSON formatting for the data to be parsed correctly. You’ll often find examples of how to format your data in the support docs, so it’s often a good idea to start by copying and pasting those examples. 

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Testing Your Webhook and Request

With your HTTP module fully configured, click “OK”, and then run your module once. You may also need to set your application to listen for incoming requests. 

You should see that this module was successful. However, all that means is that sending the request was successful. You’ll need to check the app that you’re sending data to in order to confirm everything worked. 

As you can see in the screenshot, Airtable received our request, with each piece of data parsed and formatted correctly. We can now build an automation in Airtable with the data sent through Make.

Build outside the box

Webhooks are a convenient way to send data from one platform to another as you’re building advanced, multi-part automations. You can even use them to avoid making overly complex branching paths within a single automation. 

HTTP modules are a versatile tool for constructing automated workflows, and setting them up only takes a quick Google search. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code and low-code automation with apps like Make and Zapier, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

As a Real estate agent, you have many important tasks that you have to accomplish every day. You need to reach out to potential buyers and sellers, negotiate offers, manage closing, and more. 

It can all become tedious, but the good news is that you don’t have to do it all on your own.

With automation, you can eliminate a lot of the monotonous, robotic tasks from your workload and focus more of your time on actually speaking with clients and building relationships. 

In this post, we’ll take a quick look at three of the best automations you can use to start saving time today as a real estate agent. 

Use templated emails for quicker outreach and response times

Home buyers and sellers have many options when they’re choosing a real estate agent. Quick and informative responses can help you to stand out and keep your clients engaged. 

However, drafting emails all day to dozens of leads isn’t a great way to spend your time – especially if you find yourself rehashing similar content each time you write another email. Instead of writing all of your emails from scratch, you can use a simple automation to quickly assemble messages with templated blocks of text.

Here’s how it would work:

For example, suppose that you want to update your client after closing with information and links for movers, cleaners, or other important services. 

In many cases, you’ll likely be referring clients to the same information and resources. Rather than typing all of this information all over again for each client, you can use Airtable to make a modular email template. 

You’ll save each link, tip, or piece of information as a separate record, and select the ones you want to include in each email. 

Once your message is all set, click on “submit” and the automation will send your email. 

With an automation like this, you can just select a few options instead of writing an entire message every time. You only need to proofread each content block once, and you’ll be able to send more emails in less time, while still maintaining a personal touch.

Send automatic follow-up emails to promote engagement

Next, let’s take a look at automated follow-up campaigns. 

You don’t want to lose clients after only a single showing. You want to keep them engaged over the long term with new offers, new houses on the market, and more.

However, following up with leads and clients every week can take up a lot of time if you do it manually. Instead, you can set up an automation to do all of the heavy lifting for you. 

All you have to do is add each of your contacts to the appropriate mailing list, and then write a few emails or text messages to send out automatically.

The automation will send out each message on a preset schedule, so you can send a followup email or text every week asking if they want to see new properties, if they need more information, or whatever else you want.

You could even schedule an email to celebrate your client’s 1-year closing anniversary!

Drip campaigns like this can often be set up within CRMs like Hubspot or email newsletter apps like Mailchimp, but you can also build custom tools to run your campaigns through low-code automation. 

By using low-code automation instead of a specific marketing tool, you can view and manage your data in one place, and control every aspect of your campaigns.

However you choose to implement your followup campaigns, they’ll be a surefire way of keeping your clients engaged and getting more repeat business. Plus, most of the work will be done by the robots.

Use an email-scraping automation to quickly file new contact data

Finally, we’ll give you an overview of how you can populate your CRM with an email-scraping automation. 

If you use platforms like Zillow, Upnest, or others, they probably send you lots of automated emails about new leads or new listings in your area. These emails can be a great source for finding new buyers and sellers, but adding them into your CRM or another database can be tedious. 

In some cases, you’ll be able to integrate the real estate platform directly with a CRM, but depending on the software you’re using, this won’t always be possible

No matter what tools you’re using, you can build a low-code automation to add leads from these emails to your CRM or any other database.

Here’s how it works:

Whenever you get an email in your inbox about a new lead, the automation will identify it by its content. The sender, the subject line, and most of the body will always be the same, so the automation can detect any email that matches those parameters. 

Then, the automation will look for the unique content: the lead’s name or email address, or the property listing that the email mentions. That content can then be automatically copied to a database or CRM for easy organization and follow-up. 

Real estate platforms like Zillow or Upnest can be great sources for leads, but you don’t want to have to go digging through your inbox just to find their contact information. 

Email scraping automations will ensure that all of your leads end up in your CRM or database, without requiring manual data entry

Free up time by automating repetitive tasks

Like any profession, being a real estate agent involves a lot of repetitive, robotic tasks. But thanks to automation, you don’t have to do those tasks yourself anymore. Automated workflows can help you to communicate with your clients and quickly build a database of leads.

If you want to learn more about setting up automations like these, you can check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Make (formerly known as Integromat) is one of the best automation tools available for builders who prefer a low-code approach over strict no-code. 

If you’re familiar with some basic coding principles, an app like Make is an easy way to create more complex and useful automations.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to loop through arrays in Make so you can build automations that perform actions for every item in the array. With loops, you could send an email to every address in a list, or assign a task in Notion to every person in an array.

Create a Loop with 4 easy steps

You can loop through an array in your Make scenarios with just a few simple steps.

1. Get an array: use any module in Make to import an array into your scenario

2. Add an iterator: from the Flow Control menu, select “Iterator”. This will signal that you want to start a loop.

3. Add actions: add any actions you want to perform as part of your loop. Every action added after an iterator will be performed once for each item in your array.

4. Add a filter to exit your loop: if you’d like to end the loop and perform subsequent actions only once each, add a filter after the last module in your loop. 

That’s all you need to do loop through arrays with the iterator. If you’d like to see how it works in a little more detail, keep reading for a full tutorial walkthrough using an example scenario. 

Step 1: Get an array

First, you need to have an array for Make to work with.

In our screenshot below, we have an Airtable base with a linked record field that we’ll be using in our examples. Items in a linked record field are stored as arrays, so this will be perfect for our demonstration. You can follow along with an Airtable base as well, or use any other app you’d like that has an array you can use. 

If you’ll be using Airtable along with us, just add an Airtable module in Make, and enter the ID of the record you want to grab.

Tip: Getting Record IDs in Airtable

If you ever need to get the ID of an Airtable record, just add a formula field to the table. Enter Record_ID() as the formula, and Airtable will show the ID of that record.

Copy that ID into Make so you can find your record. Run the module, and you should see that Make retrieved the record you identified.

Step 2: Add an iterator

Now that you have a record with an array, you can add an iterator. Click on the green “Flow Control” icon, and select “Iterator” from the menu that pops up. 

In the Array field, enter an array from a previous module

In our example, we’ll choose this data called “Name”, which contains the names of some fruits.

Tip: Identifying arrays in Make

You can confirm that a piece of data in Make is formatted as an array by checking to see if the name ends in brackets like this: [ ]

As you can see in the screenshot above, “Name” is an array, so we can enter it into the array field.

Tip: Converting a list into an array in Make

The array field will only accept an array, but if you’d like to use a list instead, you’ll just need to use a simple formula to convert it.

Just use the “split” formula, put your list before the semicolon, and enter the delimiter that your list uses after the semicolon. In most cases, the delimiter will be something like a comma, or a semicolon.

Step 3: Add actions after your Iterator

On its own, the iterator won’t perform any actions.Instead, it will make it so any module added after the iterator will run once for every item in the array. 

So if you add a Slack message module after the iterator, it will send that message once for every item in the array. If there are 4 items in the array, a single Slack module will send 4 slack messages

In our Slack message, we’ll insert the “Bundle Order Position”, which will show the number 1 for the first item in the array, 2 for the second, etc. We’ll also add this piece of data called “Value”, which is the actual item in the array. In this case, it will be the name of a fruit.

You can enter whatever data you’d like into your message, but including dynamic data like the Bundle Order Position and Value will clearly show you that the automation is running for each individual item. 

Click on “Run once”, and you should see several Slack messages pop up. As you can see in the screenshot,  we received a message for each fruit in the array, numbered in the order they were in. 

Step 4: Adding filters to exit the Loop

That’s all you need to do to set up a loop in Make. But what if you want to perform a single action after you loop through the array?

For instance, maybe you want to send a message that says “All set!”

If you add another module to this scenario, it will run the module for each message in the array. In other words, you’d get 4 “All Set!” messages instead of just one.

You can add another Slack module and test it out. Both of your Slack modules should run for each item in the array.

To signal the end of the loop, all you have to do is add a filter by clicking on the small dots that connect your modules. 

Set the filter so the scenario will only continue if the Bundle Order Position is equal to the last item in the bundle.

Since we know our Fruits array has 4 items, we could set it to 4. However, you won’t always know offhand how many items there are in a given array. So instead, let’s use the length() function to dynamically set this value to the number of items in the array.

Now, once the iterator runs through the last item, the scenario will continue and perform every subsequent step only once each.

Click “run once” again, and you should see 5 Slack messages: one for each item in the array, and a fifth that says “All Set!”. If so, your iterator is good to go.

Build dynamic automations with loops

Adding loops to your Make scenarios will let you build more effective and versatile automations. They’re a very useful tool for working dynamically with data, even when you don’t know exactly how much data you’ll have to process. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code and low-code automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Google Drive is a great tool for storing shared documents, but setting up folder structures for new clients and projects can be a tedious task. 

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to automatically create nested folders in Google Drive using Zapier. This means that you’ll be able to make a new folder, create additional folders within that first folder, and so on. 

A nested folder automation is a useful addition to a client onboarding workflow, a project launch workflow, or any situation where you need to frequently make sets of similarly structured folders. 

Creating folders is a simple automation suitable for any skill level, so you can follow along even if you haven’t used Zapier much at all yet. 

Create a Trigger

As with any Zapier automation, you’ll need to have a triggering event before you can add actions like creating folders. 

Your triggering event can be nearly anything, but it’s best for this tutorial if your trigger includes data you can use to name your new folders.

In our example, we’ll use a “New Record” in our Airtable database of clients as a trigger. When we check the “Onboard” column for a client in this database, that record will appear in the “Onboarded Clients” view, and trigger the automation.

Learn more about triggering automations with Airtable views in this post

You can use a similar trigger, or use whichever app you’d like here. Test your trigger to get some data, and continue.

Create a New Folder

Add a step, choose Google Drive as the app, and choose ‘Create Folder’ as the Action Event. Sign in to your Google Drive account, and continue.

Select the Drive that you’d like to use, or leave the field blank to default to using “My Drive”. 

Next, you’ll need to specify the folder where you want to create your first new folder. 

The easiest and most reliable way to identify a Google Drive folder in Zapier is to grab it from the URL.

In a separate tab, open up your Google Drive and open up the folder that you want to use. In your address bar, highlight the alphanumeric code after “/folders/” .

This string of characters is your folder’s ID, and it's the best way to designate a folder for use in Zapier.

Otherwise, you’ll have to navigate a clumsy UI to dig through all of your folders, and depending on the ownership of each folder, you might not be able to find them at all. 

So to keep things simple, copy the string of characters after “/folders/” and paste it into the Parent Folder field. 

Give your new folder a name. We recommend using data from your trigger to make sure that the name will be unique each time the automation runs. We’ll use the Client Name from our Airtable trigger. 

Test this step, and check Google Drive to make sure the new folder has been created as expected. You can enter “alternate” in the “Search folder data…” field to find the alternate link, which is your folder’s URL. 

Created a Nested Folder within Your First Folder

To make a folder within the first folder you created, add another Google Drive - New Folder step. 

This time, set the ‘Parent Folder’ as the folder you created in the previous step. You’ll do this with the folder’s ID again, but this time, you don’t have to open up a new tab

Click on the ‘Parent Folder’ field, and click on “2. ID”. This means that Zapier will use the ID of the folder created in Step 2. 

Give a name to your new folder. We’re going to name ours “{Company} Deliverables”. Continue and test this step.

Once again, you can use the alternate link to pull up your folder in drive and confirm that it worked properly. 

If you’d like to add more folders, you can repeat these steps as desired.

Turn on the Zap and give it a live test

Now you can turn your Zap on and give it a complete test all at once. Add a new record to your Airtable view (or do whatever you need to in order to activate your chosen trigger), and wait a few minutes. 

Once the Zap runs, it will create all of your folders simultaneously. 

A simple automation to save time and stay organized

Now you know how to make nested Google Drive folders with Zapier. This is a simple but useful technique for setting up new clients, new projects, and more. It will also ensure that every folder is created in a consistent way, so you don’t need to waste time looking through disorganized files to find what you need. 

If you’d like to learn more about building no-code and low-code automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

An automation is only as good as the data you feed into it.

If you build an automation on bad data, you’ll get a messy automation that’s prone to errors and bugs. If you use high-quality data, you can create a useful and reliable automated workflow.

While you might be eager to start automating your company’s workflows right away, it’s best to ensure that your data is ready for automation before you begin. 

In this post, we’ll show you the difference between good data and bad data, and we’ll explain how using the right data will prevent all sorts of problems.

Avoid redundancies in your data

Good data doesn’t have any redundancies

You don’t want to have multiple records for the same person, or the same company, or the same project that you’re tracking.

Redundancy makes it hard to use your data in any capacity, but it’s especially frustrating when you’re trying to build automations. 

With a redundant dataset, you might end up running an onboarding automation ten times for the same client, or setting the same task repeatedly for a given project. 

If you want to use a dataset for automation, make sure that you only have one entry for each item that you want to track. 

Only track relevant attributes

Good data has relevant attributes - and only relevant attributes.

When you’re creating records, it can be tempting to make a field for every conceivable attribute. 

But if you’re looking to build automations with your datasets, you should limit your databases to only include fields that are relevant for whatever you’re tracking. 

If you’re maintaining a database of the clients you work with, you’ll probably want to include things like their company name, your main point of contact at the company, or their start date - in other words,  information that’s relevant to your relationship and the automation you want to build.

In general, you should only include attributes that you intend to use or track. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a cluttered, messy database. 

Irrelevant attributes can make it harder to build automations as you comb through a bunch of useless data to find what you’re looking for. 

It can also make it harder to add complete records to the database, as all of the superfluous fields encourage your team to take shortcuts and post incomplete records. 

Make sure your records are complete

While we’re on the subject, Good data is complete!

Whatever attributes you choose to add to your database, make sure that they’re filled out completely for every record.

If you build an automation connected to an incomplete database, it could prevent the automation from working properly. 

For example, let’s say one of your automations is supposed to send out reminders to your client an hour before each of your meetings.

If the client’s “email” field is blank, the automation won’t be able to send them anything, and will just return an error. 

Keeping complete records is always a good practice, but it’s especially important if you’re building automations that rely on those records. 

Build datasets that easily reveal key insights

Good data can be summarized to easily find key takeaways.

You should be able to take a quick look at your database and immediately see some of your most important metrics. 

Your “Projects” database should be able to show you at a glance how many projects your team is working on right now, and which projects have outstanding work or are still awaiting payment. 

Getting good summaries out of your data will often depend on many of the other things we’ve talked about in this video. 

If you have complete, consistent records with no redundancies, it should be pretty straightforward to find the takeaways that you need. 

If you’re not able to learn what you need to at a glance, then you’ll probably need to go back and rethink what attributes you’re tracking. 

Once you’re collecting the right datapoints, you’ll easily get the insights you’re looking for. 

It all starts with the data

No-code automation is one of the best strategies for optimizing your business and saving time. But before you start connecting your apps in Zapier, Make, or Unito, you need to make sure the data you want to work with is ready to support automation. 

Once you’re sure that your data has no redundancies, tracks relevant attributes, contains complete records, and shows you useful insights, you can start building time-saving automations that remove robotic tasks from your workflows forever. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code automation and managing your data, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Build a fun word game with no-code tools. 

We all know that automation is a great way to save time and be more productive, but life isn’t all about work. Sometimes, you need to take a break from everything and just have a little fun. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to build a simple ad-lib word game with Zapier. With this quick and easy fill-in-the-blanks word game, you’ll be able to send a completed story in Slack by filling out a short form. 

This quick no-code automation is easy to build and customize, so you can put it together in a few minutes and start having some laughs with your coworkers or classmates. 

Required Software

For this tutorial, we’ll be using Zapier, Google Forms, Google Sheets, and Slack. 

However, you can use just about any software you’d like. For instance, you can collect your answers with Typefrom instead of Google Forms, or send the finished ad-lib in an email instead of Slack. 

Regardless of the specific apps you use, the automation will still work in basically the same way, it’s up to you to pick the software you’d like to use. 

Writing the story

First, you’ll need to write the script for your ad-lib story. Here’s what we wrote for our story:

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One day, an entrepreneur called {Name} had a very {adjective} idea for an app. 

“It’s like {app name} for {plural noun},” they said. 

“It will revolutionize the way {plural noun} {pres. verb} {noun}”

They bought office space in a {type of building}’s basement in {city name}, and raised ${number} in venture capital.

{company name} bought the app for over ${number}.

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As you can see, this text tells the story of a startup, with several blanks for the player to fill in. 

We’d recommend writing your story with actual words first, then going back and replacing a few key words with placeholders: “noun”, “verb”, “adjective”, and other terms like that as appropriate. These are the words that will be filled in every time someone plays the game.

We’ve used curly braces to indicate our placeholders, but the formatting of these placeholders doesn’t matter. They’re just for your convenience as you’re building.

Once your story is all set, it’s time to make a form you can use to collect responses. 

Making the form

In Google Forms - or your preferred survey app - make a new form, and include a question for each blank in your ad-lib. 

As you can see in the screenshot below, our form has a question to match each “noun”, “verb”, or other placeholder. 

When your form is finished, create a spreadsheet to collect answers and trigger your automation. Be sure to fill it out at least once so that you have some test data to work with. 

With some test data ready to go, you can open up Zapier and start building the automation.

Zap Trigger: New Spreadsheet Row

Create a new Zap, and use “New Spreadsheet Row in Google Sheets” as your trigger. 

To identify the spreadsheet you want to use, open up your sheet and grab the ID from the URL bar. The spreadsheet ID is the string of characters between “/d/” and “/edit”. Copy and paste that ID into Zapier.

Select the worksheet you want to use, and click continue. Test the trigger, and you should see the answers you filled in earlier. 

Zap Action: Send a Slack Message

Now that we have all the data we need to compile our ad-lib story, we’re going to put it all together and send it as a message in Slack. 

Add a new step to your Zap, and choose Slack as the app. You can either send a direct message to one person, or send it to a channel for everyone to see. 

Copy and paste your story script into the message body, and replace your placeholder text with actual data from the first step. This way, the finished story will say “geese” or “mice” or whatever the player entered instead of “noun”. 

Finish configuring your message, and click continue.

Test the step, and you should see a message appear in Slack. Now, you can turn your Zap on, and whenever someone completes the form, you’ll see a completed ad-lib show up in Slack.

Try something new with no-code

While no-code automation is an indispensable tool for improving productivity, it’s also a great way to build a creative and silly project when you’re just looking to have a little fun. Try building this simple game or coming up with your own idea to see what no-code tools can do. 

If you’d like to find more no-code automation tutorials, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Workflow automation isn’t something that happens overnight. If a workflow is conducted 100% manually today, it will take some time to transform it into a fully (or mostly) automated workflow.

Using an iterative process to build automations will ensure that every stage of the workflow produces the results you’re hoping to achieve, while trying to automate an entire workflow all at once will result in a complicated build process and may produce messy, unusable data. 

In this post, we’ll explain how you can expand an automation over time, and highlight the criteria needed to automate additional actions within a workflow. 

The Early Phases of Automation: Supporting and Standardizing Manual Work

When you first build an automated workflow, many of the steps involved in that workflow will still require manual human input. In many cases, you and your team will need to gather data from various sources and manually enter it into the automation to produce the desired result. 

For instance, an early phase client onboarding automation might require you or other team members to fill out a survey and manually enter the client’s name, the email address for your main point of contact, their kickoff date and other info. 

Once the survey is completed, the automation would create some folders, a Slack channel, meeting docs, and other assets. 

As you can see from this example, an early phase automation will save you some time, but it will still require a considerable amount of manual input. However, you don’t need to be worried if your early efforts in automation actually involve quite a bit of human work. By automating even a few steps, you’re still creating a much more consistent process, and you can expand on these initial automations to reduce the manual workload over time. 

Later Phase Automations: Fully Automated Workflows

As you iterate and add more automated steps to your workflows, a later-phase automation will involve much less manual work. Instead of finding and entering data yourself, the automation will find the information it needs from your databases and apps. 

Returning to our client onboarding example, a more mature version of the automation would eliminate most or all of the manual steps. Instead of requiring manual entry in a survey, it would find the client’s name and other info from a database, which would be populated from another automation connected to your email and CRM. 

The entire set of automations could run whenever you mark a client as “Closed/Won” in your CRM, or by simply completing a survey with just one or two questions (instead of a dozen or more). 

With a later-phase automation, you’ll see greater time savings and even more consistent and reliable output. At the same time, your team will barely have to do any manual work at all to make it run. 

Making the Transition to a Fully Automated Workflow

At this point, you might be wondering why we don’t recommend starting with a fully automated solution in the first place. A fully-automated process clearly saves a lot more time, so why even bother with the early semi-automated phase?

Ultimately, it all comes down to data. Before you can fully automate a process, you need to have clean, consistent, and accurate data to support the automation. 

If the data for your workflow is coming in from many different sources in different formats and at different times, you’d need to build a highly complex automation just to process and clean all of your data. 

In these cases, it’s more efficient to start by automating whatever steps are already consistent enough to support automation, and to fall back on manual work and human judgment to gather the messier data.

Over time, you can improve your data funnels to collect more consistent and accurate information. As you do, you can also automate the steps that use that data. 

What starts as a manual process will eventually become fully automated, or something that happens with just a click of a button. 

Improving your Automated Workflows Incrementally

When you first build an automation, it will probably be somewhat limited in scope. Even though it will absolutely save you some time and make your process more consistent, there will be a lot of room to grow. 

As you make your data cleaner, more accurate, and more consistent, you’ll be able to automate more steps in your workflow. Eventually, you might even be able to automate the entire process from start to finish.

So don’t worry if your initial automation efforts aren’t producing massive time savings. Automation is an iterative process, not a one-time fix. Just focus on getting the right data, and you’ll achieve your automation goals. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code and low-code automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Modern SaaS tools have opened up a lot of possibilities for marketers, but they’ve also added a lot of tasks to your daily to-do list. Thankfully, no-code automation can help to ease the burden and handle a lot of your robotic work for you. 

In this post, we’ll share three of the best automations that digital marketers can use to get their work done faster. These automations will help you to do more work in less time, so you can focus on refining your strategy instead of doing repetitive work. If you’d like to implement any of these automations for yourself or for your company, check out our blog for tutorial resources or reach out to XRay for a membership. 

Sending Automated Messages to Inbound Leads

First up is an automation that’s been a huge help for us at XRay: responding to inbound leads with automated messages. This is a simple and flexible automation that can work in a couple of different ways based on your situation and preferences.

Fully automated responses

If you’re dealing with a very high volume of similar requests, fully automated responses can be a great option for sending out answers quickly. 

Here’s how it works: whenever someone fills out a form on your site or sends an email to your “contact” address, the automation will send them a templated response with a one-size-fits-all message: basic information about your company, the next steps they should take, etc. 

A fully automated solution will let you respond to dozens or hundreds of inquiries without any manual work, but you may be looking for an option with a bit more customization. 

Customizable templates 

As an alternative to fully automated responses, you could use Airtable to compile a database of pre-written messages. Each message would contain some useful information, a link to a relevant site, or other content. 

Using an Airtable survey to send templated messages to your leads will let you personalize each message while still cutting down on repetitive manual work.The survey would let you pick from pre-written blocks to quickly assemble a helpful and relevant answer. 

With a survey-driven approach, you can make sure that each inbound lead gets an appropriate, personalized response. If someone wants to know about pricing, you can send them a link to your Pricing Plans page; if they want to know more about how you work, you can attach a case study.

Using a survey to respond to inbound leads requires a little manual work, but still lets you craft high-quality responses to each new inquiry with just a few clicks. 

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Whichever approach you use, automating your responses to inbound leads will help you to save time and keep your messaging consistent. So stop spending all day writing identical emails to answer identical questions: let the robots shoulder the burden, and start automating your inbound lead funnel today. 

Automatically Create Google Slides Presentations with Up-to-the Minute Analytics Data

Next, let’s take a look at an automation that will help you to make visually engaging presentations in Google Slides with your marketing data.

While you’re probably accustomed to combing through Google Analytics to find trends and insights, you’ll usually need something a bit simpler to show to management or other departments. 

With this automated workflow, you’ll be able to create charts and graphics in Google Slides that are automatically updated with new data from Google Analytics. 

Here’s how it works:

However often you’d like, the automation will fetch data from Google Analytics and export it to a Google Sheet. Then, you just need to create a Google Slides presentation, and add a chart that’s linked to the Sheet. 

Whenever the automation updates the data in Google Sheets, the graphic in your presentation will be updated to match

You’ll be able to show your team up-to-the-minute data in a graphic that’s easy to follow, and after the initial setup, you won’t have to lift a finger to make it happen. By automating graphics in your presentations, you can make it faster and easier to share important data with your team. 

Create Customized Landing Pages with a Short Survey

Finally, let’s take a look at an automation that can help you to create your marketing campaigns: automated landing page creation. 

Crafting targeted landing pages with precise messaging is a great way to speak directly to a specific audience. But creating those landing pages can be time-consuming, and often requires some web design skills that not everyone on your team will have. 

With this automation, you’ll be able to create and publish a new landing page just by filling out a quick survey. 

Here’s how it works:

First, you just need to create a landing page template in a website builder like Webflow. The automation will work best if you create a “Landing Page” collection, so you can use Webflow’s CMS like you would with blog posts. 

Then, you can build an automation to create new pages based on that template. You can just fill out a survey with the text and images that you want to use in your landing page, and the automation will create the page and send you the link. 

This kind of automation won’t necessarily save a lot of time, but it’s a great way to get rid of technical barriers to updating your website. Anyone on your team can just fill out a survey to make a new landing page for a targeted campaign. They don’t need to know the first thing about web design or Webflow; all they have to do is write the copy. 

Focus on the Work that Matters

Running marketing campaigns requires a lot of repetitive work as you create new ads and content, analyze your results, and keep the conversation going with inbound leads. 

Automations like these can’t replace your creativity or your strategic insights as a marketing professional, but they can help you to spend less of your time on tedious robotic work. 

So start building some automations today to save yourself some time, and reach out to XRay.Tech if you’d like to start setting up an automated infrastructure for your company. 

If you'd like to learn more about no-code and low-code automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Automated workflows are a great tool for saving time, and with no-code automation, there are more options than ever for automating robotic tasks.

If you’re not sure where to start and want to get results quickly, we’ve put together a list of 5 automations you can build right now to kickstart your automation projects.

We’ll include links to tutorial videos and blogs for every automation, so you can follow along and start building today.

ZoomTube: Free Cloud Storage for Your Zoom Recordings

First, let’s look at an automation we like to call “ZoomTube”.

This workflow saves all of your Zoom recordings to YouTube for free permanent cloud storage.

With the rapid growth of remote work, businesses rely on apps like Zoom more than ever. We all have important conversations, make decisions, and create action items during our Zoom calls

You might even hold virtual conferences or workshops that would be great to record for anyone who missed the event

Recording your Zoom calls lets you save them for future reference, but Zoom’s cloud storage plans are expensive if you’re recording often.

With ZoomTube, you can automatically save your Zoom recordings as unlisted videos in YouTube to create a free permanent archive. ‘

Once it’s set up, all you have to do is record your Zoom calls on the cloud as you normally would. The automation will then upload your recordings to your YouTube account, and send a viewable link to Slack or Teams so you can easily find the video. 

You can create a Zoom to YouTube automation in Zapier with just a few steps, so check out the video to build your own ZoomTube automation today.

Creating Templated Presentation Docs

Next, we’d like to show you an automation that will make it easier to prep for all your meetings: automated document creation from templates.

You probably have several documents that you use regularly, like weekly meeting agendas or project delivery decks. 

While you may have already converted those documents into templates to save some time, you can make the process even more efficient with this simple automation. 

All you have to do is update your template with variables that Zapier can use to swap in different names, dates, etc. 

To generate a new document, you’ll just fill out a form in an app like Airtable or Typeform with all of the information that you want to insert into your variables. 

You can even set up the automation to make multiple documents at once, or share a link to the newly created document with your clients. 

In our video tutorial, we’ll show you how to build your templated documents automation in a few easy steps. 

Draft Quickbooks Invoices Automatically When Deals are Updated in Hubspot

Want to make things easier for your billings department? Try out this workflow to draft Quickbooks invoices automatically whenever a deal is marked as Closed/Won in Hubspot

Using this automation is easy, but it does require a little bit of behind-the-scenes setup. In order to automatically match a lead in Hubspot to a client in Quickbooks, you’ll need to set up a database in Airtable. The Airtable database will act as an intermediary, pairing the email addresses from Hubspot with unique Quickbooks IDs. You can also use the database to control the billing amount for each invoice by setting project types or other attributes.

It may sound a little complicated, but we’ll walk you through it step-by-step in our tutorial video. Drafting invoices with just a click in Hubspot is a great way to make sure that the internal handoff from your sales team to your accounting team is fast and accurate, so we really recommend trying this automation out if you’re constantly bringing on new clients.

Check out the video for the full tutorial, and start building!

Automatically Sync Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable and Other Databases

If you’re like most companies, you probably have important databases and spreadsheets in a lot of different apps.

Keeping those databases in sync manually can be a tedious, error-prone process. Thankfully, there’s a much better way to sync your databases, and it’s called Unito.

Unito is a no-code automation platform with a single purpose: syncing your databases across different apps.

When you connect two databases in Unito, records added or updated in either table will be synced in the other, so you can maintain total parity in your data without doing any extra work.

Unito supports Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, and many other popular spreadsheet and database apps. 

On our blog, you can find walkthroughs for setting up syncs between Sheets and Notion, Airtable and Notion, or Sheets and Airtable.

But whatever specific apps you want to use, the principles of setting up a sync are always the same, so don’t worry if you’re not seeing your preferred software in that list; these tutorials will still help you get started.

Setting up a sync in Unito only takes a few minutes, and once it’s up and running, you can rest easy knowing that your data is accurate and up-to-date in every app. 

So check out the video and the links to try setting up a Unito sync today, and keep your databases consistent. 

An Automated Social Media Calendar Powered by Airtable

Finally, let’s take a quick look at building an automated social media calendar in Airtable.

There are tools that already exist for scheduling your social media posts, like Hootsuite or Buffer, but these aren’t always a great fit for your budget or the tools you prefer to use.

If you’re already using Airtable to manage your company’s data, it can also be a convenient place to schedule all of your social media posts.

Once you have the automation set up, all you have to do is a new record for each post with the text, images, or other attachments you want. Pick the platform you want to publish it on, the date you want to publish it, and add it to the queue.

The social media calendar automation works with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or pretty much any other network you want to use.

Just check out the video or this blog to learn how to set it up. With this automation, you’ll be able to spend less time on publishing your posts, and more time on crafting the right message to send out to your followers. 

Getting Started with No-code Automation

No-code automation lets everyone build useful tools and streamline their workflows, regardless of their technical experience. If you want to start automating your robotic tasks, any of these automations can be a great place to start. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

If you’ve spent any time at all exploring the no-code automation space, then you probably already know that Zapier is an extremely useful tool for automating your daily menial tasks and saving time at work. 

While ease-of-use is one of Zapier’s strengths, it’s always helpful to have some pointers to get started. If you’re new to Zapier, this post will help you to begin understanding and using Zapier from square one. 

We’ll explain what Zapier is for, give you a quick overview of the available plans, and walk you through building your first Zap. You’ll see firsthand how the no-code platform lets you easily send data from one app to another to perform automated actions. 

After reading and following along with this guide, you’ll be equipped with all the knowledge you need to dive into Zapier and start building your own time-saving automations. 

What Zapier Does and How it Works

How Automations (Zaps) Work

First, let’s cover the basics of what Zapier is, and how it works. 

Zapier is a no-code automation platform. It lets you build automations by connecting different pieces of software together and sending data from one app to another. 

With Zapier, you can build automations that perform a certain set of actions whenever your specified trigger conditions are met. For example:

• Whenever I get an email from a specific client, send me a copy of that email as a direct message in Slack

• Whenever a deal is marked as Closed/Won in Hubspot, create an invoice in Quickbooks

• Whenever I get a Zoom invitation in my email inbox, create a “Meeting Notes” document in Google Drive

As you can see in the examples above, every Zap has a trigger event that prompts it to run, and at least one action that it performs. 

Moving data between apps

One of the key things to know about Zapier is that every step can share its data with future steps. In the CRM -> Quickbooks automation example, Zapier will use the data it retrieves in the trigger step to create the invoice in Quickbooks, dynamically filling in fields with the customer’s name, the billing amount, etc. 

The flow of data is what makes Zapier save time. It handles data entry for you, so you don’t have to do it manually or copy and paste. Not only does this reduce the time you spend on tedious tasks, but it also makes your work more consistent as it prevents human error. 

Zapier’s Pricing Plans

Use the free plan for this tutorial

Like most SaaS tools, Zapier offers several different subscription options which you can view on their pricing page. For the sake of following along with this tutorial, you can use the Free plan.

If you’re interested in building automations to support your daily workflows, you’ll probably want to look into the Starter and Professional plans for more Zaps and features. 

If you’re building automations to support your entire company, you’ll probably need to use the Professional Plus plan or a higher tier. 

But for now, just making a free account will be fine. 

Building Your First Zap

Connecting Google Calendar to a Spreadsheet

For your first Zap, we’ll show you how to build a simple automation that connects Google Calendar to Google Sheets. Whenever you get a Calendar invite, data about the invitation will automatically be logged in a Google Sheet. 

While this automation won’t have a lot of practical applications, it will be a helpful way for you to see how you can manage the flow of data between apps in Zapier. 

In addition to a free Zapier account, you’ll also need a free Google account to create this automation. 

Creating Test Data and a Spreadsheet

Before you can make any Zap, you’ll need to have some test data to work with.

Create a calendar event on any day and at any time to use as test data. If you can, add one of your other email addresses as a guest. 

You’ll also need to create a Google Sheet to store Calendar information in. Make a new sheet and a few fields to the top row like Event Name, Start Time, End Time, and Guests. 

Creating a New Zap Trigger

Log in to Zapier and click on the “Create Zap” button. 

First, you’ll be prompted to create a trigger. Every Zap needs to have a trigger; whenever the conditions for the trigger are met, the Zap will run.

For this Zap, our trigger will be the creation of a new event in Google Calendar. Select Google Calendar as your app, and choose “New Event” as the Trigger Event.

Click continue, and sign in to your Google account. Grant the permissions that Zapier needs, and click on continue again.

Then, you’ll need to specify which calendar you want Zapier to check for new events. This will probably be your main calendar, which will simply be called [youremail]@gmail.com. Once you’ve set your calendar, click continue.

Click on “Test Trigger” to retrieve your first set of test data. You should see the event that you just created. 

Notice that Zapier has tons of data and metadata related to the event. The wealth of information that Zapier gathers from trigger events lets you do all sorts of things with your automations. 

But for now, you’re just going to add some data to your spreadsheet. 

Creating an Action Step: Create a New Row in Google Sheets

Click on continue, and add a new step.

Choose Google Sheets as your app, and pick “Create Spreadsheet Row” as your action event. 

Sign in to Google Sheets and grant Zapier access. 

Now, you’ll need to point Zapier to the Google Sheet you want to use. Select the Google Drive where the Sheet is stored (probably “My Drive”). Next, specify the sheet itself. 

The most reliable way to specify a Google Sheet or Doc in Zapier is to use its ID. To find the ID, open up the Sheet and drive and copy the string of characters between /d/ and /edit in the address bar. 

Paste the ID directly into the “Spreadsheet” field. Pick the worksheet that you want to use in your Sheets document, and wait for Zapier to find your spreadsheet’s fields.

Zapier lets you fill in each field in your spreadsheet from your trigger. As you click on each field, you’ll see a menu to select data from the trigger, so you can map the “1. Event Begins (Pretty)” to the Start Time, “1. Summary” to the Event name, etc.

Note that the “1.” just indicates the data you’re using comes from Step 1. 

Once you’ve mapped all your fields, click on Continue. 

Test your Zap and turn it on

With all your fields mapped, it’s time to test your Zap.

Note: testing an action step in Zapier will actually perform that step. Always use appropriate test data when building a Zap. In other words, use your own email addresses and other accounts that you have access to instead of a client’s. 

Click on “Test & Review”, and you should get a success message.

Head over to Google Sheets to confirm that a new row was added.

If you’re satisfied with your Zap, turn it on. You can also give it a live test now by adding a new event to Calendar. Just note that it may take several minutes for Zapier to run your Zap if you’re using the free plan. 

Wrap-up

We hope this tutorial gave you a solid introduction to Zapier as an automation platform. It’s one of many no-code apps available that can help to build useful automations or other tools. 

At XRay, we strongly believe that you don’t need to be a coder to work with tech and build workflows that save you time. 

If you’d like to learn more about no-code and low-code, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Automation requires the right mindset to be successful. Building without a strategy can lead to inefficient and less useful workflows which your team won’t want to start using.

On our blog and YouTube channel, we’ve shared many tutorials to help share the technical knowledge needed to build no-code and low-code automations, but we also want to help business leaders to craft their big-picture strategies for automation that go beyond any one app or tool. 

In this post, we’re going to share three books you can read now to start preparing for automation. These books aren’t how-to guides, or even books that are strictly about automation at all. 

Instead, these are books that will get you into the right mindset for automation. They’ll prepare you with the philosophy you need to make good choices and build your automated workflows the right way.

We’ll tell you a little about each of these books and what kind of lessons you can take away from them. We’ll also include Amazon links where you can purchase the books if you’d like. 

The End of Average

Nobody is really average

The first book we’ll look at is The End of Average by Todd Rose. In the book, Rose explores the notion of averages, and highlights how the very concept of “average” can be misleading if it’s not used properly.

To illustrate the point, he cites an example of the US Air Force designing the cockpit for a new plane in 50s based on the measurements of the average fighter pilot. However, they were surprised when their new planes experienced an unusually high rate of crashes. After some thorough investigation, they discovered that no one pilot who flew the plane actually fit the supposedly “average” measurements, making the cockpit uncomfortable for the pilots and more difficult to fly. Going forward, the Air Force abandoned the idea of building a cockpit for a single average, and instead focused on making adjustable seats to accommodate all of their pilots. They quickly found that the crash rate decreased due to the improved design. 

This anecdote illustrates that while we often assume that using a statistical average is a good basis for a one-size-fits-all approach, this isn’t always the case. Instead, making sure that something can be adjusted as needed is often a better way to support 

Automate for individuals, not for averages

How can you apply Todd Rose’s thoughts in The End of Average to no-code automation?

You can start by building your automations with specific individuals in mind. Instead of creating an automation that aims to solve everyone’s problems all at once, focus on addressing a single person’s pain points first. 

Test the automation with that person and tailor it to their needs. Make sure that it really addresses their issues first, so that they can adopt it seamlessly into their workflows. From there, you can start fleshing it out and accommodating more use cases. You can add optional paths into your automations that will only trigger if the user wants them to, or if the 

If you just start by building for a generic, “average” user, you may end up building a tool that doesn’t really suit anybody at all. 

Buy The End of Average on Amazon

Antifragile

Antifragility produces strength under pressure

Next, we’d like to recommend Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In this book, Taleb introduces the concept of “antifragility” and how it applies to a variety of systems. 

Antifragility is meant to be the exact opposite of fragility, and Taleb points out that this isn’t the same thing as strength or sturdiness. 

If you drop a wine glass and it shatters on the ground, you’d consider that glass to be fragile. If you were to drop it and it stayed intact, you might call it strong or sturdy. 

But what if dropping the glass on the floor actually made it more resilient? If something grows stronger when pressure is applied to it, then it meets Taleb’s criteria for antifragility. 

For instance, the human body can be considered antifragile in certain ways. We may get sore at first when we start exercising, but over time, our muscles become stronger and more capable the more we work them out. 

For entrepreneurs and business leaders, antifragility means building a company that can respond positively to difficult situations. Challenges should spur growth and evolution, not crisis and panic. 

Building antifragile automations

Your workflows and systems aren’t going to remain the same forever. As your business grows and changes, your automations need to be able to keep up. In other words, you need to build your automations with the antifragile concept in mind. 

You can’t always predict your future needs, but you can create automations in a way that easily enables updates. Whenever possible or practical, we recommend using an app like Airtable to perform calculations, formatting, and conditional logic rather than including it within your Zaps or Integromat scenarios. Then, you can change your automations with a quick database update. 

For instance, let’s say you want to build an automation that sends a progress update to your clients each month. You could set the trigger in Zapier to a scheduled automation that runs every month, but you’d have to turn off and edit the Zap to change that trigger later. Instead, if you set your trigger as “New Record in View” in Airtable, you can change conditions for that view on the fly without having to open Zapier at all. 

While it would be nice to build an automation once and just let it run passively, the reality is that you’ll have to make updates sooner or later. Building your automations to be easily updated will make them better able to handle difficult and changing situations. 

Buy Antifragile on Amazon

The Cold Start Problem

Exploring network effects in The Cold Start Problem

Finally, let’s take a look at The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen. In Cold Start, Chen examines the power of network effects, and demonstrates how networks can explode with exponential growth once they cross a certain threshold of users. 

After reading The Cold Start Problem, you’ll realize that network effects are present everywhere, and they’re actually a huge part of how startups achieve success. 

The book focuses a great deal on the semantics of defining how network effects relate to each other, and identifies the component pieces that make up network effects. 

While Chen’s book mostly looks at large networks of companies and consumers, you can see a similar phenomenon at work when a company begins adopting automation into their daily work. 

Achieving a network effect with automation

As you start automating, you’ll likely begin by building a few individual workflows. At first, it might not seem like your automation efforts will be enough to really save time at a significant scale. 

However, one of the benefits of automation is that each automated workflow that you build enables you to create additional workflows. This is because each automation can generate and store critical data related to your business processes, which can then be repurposed to fuel further actions. 

For instance, let’s say that you’ve built an automation for new employee onboarding. Whenever you hire a new team member, the automation sends them relevant training material and sets their initial tasks. 

As this automation runs, it can create a database with the name and contact info of each new employee, their role, their department, their start date at the company, and more. Over time, you can use that data to add more functions to your automation. You could send each new employee an onboarding feedback survey a month after they start; you could automatically compile reports to see how quickly your new hires are completing their tasks, or how often they access the resources they share. 

Regardless of how you choose to expand your automations, you’ll see that adding new features to your automations will only make them a larger and more important part of your daily workflows. 

Buy the Cold Start Problem on Amazon

Finding a new perspective on automation

Workflow automation is a great way to save time and produce more consistent results at your company, but it can require adjusting the way you think about your business. If you’re looking to get a fresh perspective that will prepare you for building automations that support your team, these books are the right place to start. 

If you’d like to learn more about automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

If you could peer into the future, what would your company look like after you automated your robotic tasks?

In our recent posts, we’ve explained how an automated infrastructure can transform your company from the bottom up. In this post, we’ll show you what your company might look like once you’ve built that infrastructure, and how it will improve the way you work. 

We don’t have a crystal ball to show you how your company’s future will unfold, but we can share some of the success stories we’ve built with our members. The automations we’ve built for our members have not only saved them time, but also given them the capacity to do more than they ever could. 

Saving Time Every Week with Automation

For many, the primary goal of automation is to save time and accomplish your business processes faster. 

No-code and low-code automation excel at shaving minutes off of every robotic task, and the cumulative effects can be staggering. 

Saving 3 Hours a Week for Verb

To facilitate one-on-one coaching through their platform, fitness and wellness company Verb creates a profile page on their site for every coach they work with. Each page includes a photo and bio of the coach, and listings for their services. 

As a rapidly growing company, Verb had to devote a few hours each week to creating profile pages manually as they onboarded new coaches. Putting together a profile page involved a lot of back and forth to gather all the information needed about the coach, their services, and their pricing. It also required messing around in Webflow and Stripe to create products and publish the pages. 

XRay’s automations simplify the process into a single form that Verb can send to their coaches. Once they fill it out, a page is created in Webflow with all of the correct information, including unique Stripe products for the coach’s services. Verb’s team can just review the output and approve it to publish. 

Workflow automation massively reduced the amount of time Verb’s team had to spend on coach onboarding. In total, they saved about 3 hours a week on the process.

Reallocating Time to Mindful Tasks

XRay members like Verb have enjoyed huge time savings from automating their workflows, but the benefits of automation go further than that. Automating also lets them refocus their time on work that’s more valuable, and it can create entirely new possibilities. 

Creating Time for More Valuable Work

The hours that you save each week with automated workflows aren’t just nice stats for your internal metrics. Every minute and every hour saved by an automated workflow is another minute or hour that your team can devote to tasks that are truly worth their time.

You’re not paying your team just to perform all of the mindless, copy-and-paste tasks that automation excels. You brought them on board for their unique skills; their creativity, their strategic or analytic prowess, their specialized skill sets in design or development or finance. 

When you automate your team’s robotic tasks, you’re setting them up to spend more time on valuable tasks that truly require their attention and abilities. 

Think about the tedious tasks that fill up your team’s to-do list. Are you getting the most value you can from their output? What would you rather have them focus their time on? Automating their workflows will help you to concentrate your team’s time where it can have the greatest impact for your company. 

Unlocking New possibilities with low-code automation

No-code and low-code automations can do more than replicate and streamline existing processes. You can also use tools like Zapier or Integromat to add new features and functions to the tools you’re already using. 

For instance, XRay worked with the Entrepreneurship Foundation (EF) to transform a Shopify store into a platform for Connecticut’s student entrepreneurs to sell their products. Directly creating a Shopify profile for hundreds of students would be extremely impractical, so EF needed an alternative solution.

Using low-code tools like Integromat, XRay built a series of automated workflows that let students submit products for EF’s approval. With these automations, EF doesn’t need to do the manual work of uploading each individual product, but still retains control over the products that end up on their Shopify store. 

Add-on features like these could be built with code, but a no-code/low-code approach accelerates build time and keeps costs much more manageable. 

Ultimately, no-code/low-code automation isn’t just about saving time; it’s also a more accessible way to build nearly any software tool you can think of. 

Use Automation to Document Your Processes

Documentation is a key part of the automation process at XRay. Even before you start automating a process, you need to chart it out step-by-step to find the best way to automate certain steps while preserving human inputs at other steps. 

When an automation is complete, you have an ideal opportunity to document the process that it supports. Automation ensures that many steps of the process will be performed the same way every time; with the right documentation, you can also instill a similar consistency with your human inputs, and make sure that your team knows how to use the resources that are designed to help them.

Train Your Team with Process Pages

A Process Page is a non-technical document that simply explains what an automation does and how to use it. At XRay, we create Process Pages for every automation that we deliver to our clients. 

With a Process Page, you can train your team to use your new automations. Each Page will document any forms or other tools they need to use to launch the automations, and will explain the situations where it’s appropriate to use the automation. 

As you build more automations to support your company, you’ll simultaneously build up an extensive set of training documents in the form of Process Pages, which will only make it easier to onboard new team members and enable them to contribute from day one. 

Save Time and Focus on What Matters

Building an automated infrastructure to support your company will help your team to save time, focus more of their attention on value-generating tasks, and will enable you to document many of your key processes. 

If you’d like to learn more, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.