The XRay.Tech Blog

No-code and low-code automation is growing fast, and each year brings new advances to the technology and new challenges for us to grapple with. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at three of the trends that are going to define low-code automation in 2022. These trends will shape the way we build automations, what software we choose to use, and the people that get involved with automation in the first place. 

Survey-driven Automations will become a popular solution

The first trend we’ll touch on is the rise of survey-driven automations. 

If you’re not familiar with the term, a survey-driven automation is exactly what it sounds like: it’s an automation that runs whenever you fill out a specific survey. Once triggered, the automation can then use data from that survey to perform any automated action that you want. 

For instance, you might build a client onboarding automation triggered with a survey. The form might include prompts for information like the client’s name, their project type, the project start date, the assigned project manager, etc. 

Once you complete the designated form, the automation could then use the data you entered to execute a series of tasks. It could generate folders in Google Drive and channel in Slack with your client’s name; it could generate a project in Basecamp with to-dos; it could send calendar invites for weekly meetings, and more. 

At XRay, we’re seeing survey-based automations becoming a popular choice among our team and our clients because survey triggers are a great way to stay in control of your automations. As the user of the automation, you can decide when it runs and what information goes into it.

For non-technical team members, the precise control afforded by surveys is an enormous advantage. Even without any specialized technical knowledge, they can easily understand how and when to trigger the automation, making it simple for them to take charge of the workflow. 

With all of the benefits of survey-triggered automations, we expect them to become extremely popular this year. If you’d like to try building them yourselves, we’d recommend giving Airtable a shot for building your forms and databases. From there, you can try using apps like Slack, email, and Google Drive to create simple but useful automations.

SaaS Tools will focus on in-app automations

Our next trend isn’t one we’re excited about, but it’s definitely something that no-coders will have to deal with a lot in 2022. 

As more and more people seek to automate their workflows, many SaaS tools are responding by creating in-app automations, rather than opening up their API to dedicated automation platforms like Zapier and Integromat. 

You may have already seen the native automation features in apps like Slack, Quickbooks, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and more. 

Helpful automation widgets in popular software aren’t a bad thing on their own, but they often come at the expense of integrations for that software in Zapier or Integromat. For instance, you can make a poll in Slack with a simple keyboard command, but this feature isn’t available if you’re building a Slack automation in Zapier. 

Ultimately, SaaS tools are adding automation directly to their apps because they see automation platforms like Zapier as an off-ramp for their users. After all, if a Zapier automation lets you view all of your aggregated lead data in a convenient Airtable base, you might not bother opening up Pipedrive very often. 

For many workflows and use cases, the data a SaaS tool gathers is far more important than the app itself. But each SaaS developer naturally wants to make sure that you’re spending as much time in their app as possible, which is why they often prefer to support in-app automation tools rather than granting public access to those features through their API.

Whenever possible, we recommend using dedicated platforms like Zapier, Integromat, Unito, Coupler or others to build your automations. This will let you keep as many of your automations as possible in one spot, making it easier to track your automated activity and link your automations together for more productive workflows.

We can’t control what each developer decides to include in their API, but we can choose to build a more visible and scalable automated infrastructure anyway.

More people than ever will pick up automation as a second discipline

Lastly, let’s take a look at an awesome automation trend that really represents what XRay is all about. 

We’re already seeing professionals from every background imaginable picking up no-code automation as a second discipline, and we’re certain that this trend is only going to continue to grow in 2022. 

One of no-code automation’s greatest advantages is that it’s accessible to everyone. You don’t need to have any background in software development or coding to open up Zapier and start connecting your apps. 

This year, we expect to see marketers, lawyers, accountants, HR reps, entrepreneurs and more start building automations to save time for themselves and for their team. 

If you and your team decide to make 2022 your Year of Automation, we’ve got a tip to help keep things straight as you’re building: make a channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams called something like “Auto Updates”. 

As you’re building your automations, add a step at the end that sends an alert to that channel whenever it runs, with a little context about what happened.

Simple messages like “We just received a question from a new lead!” will help to keep everyone aware of what your automations are doing, so they can add them to their workflows as well.

You can check out other tips and tutorials on our YouTube channel if you’re interested in learning more about automation, but you can also learn a lot by just opening up Zapier and trying things out. See what works and what doesn’t, and take it from there. 

No-code is empowering everyone to build workflows that boost their productivity, regardless of their background or experience level. This year, we think that more people than ever will start automating, because the one thing we all value is time. So check out some tutorials and start building; it’s probably a lot easier than you think!

A bright future for automation in 2022

2022 is going to be a huge year for automation. Survey-driven automations are going to give people more control over their workflows; in-app automations and limited API access are, unfortunately, going to be a growing annoyance; and more people will pick up no-code automation as a secondary skillset, creating more time for themselves and their team as they build automated workflows. 

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.

While some automations can work as standalone gadgets in your toolbelt, you’ll need to approach automation more systematically to optimize time savings and output boosts at your company. 

Instead of thinking about building a series of independent automations, you should plan on creating an extensive automated infrastructure that supports every layer of your business. 

Building an automated infrastructure relies on connecting each automated workflow to a centralized database, which we at XRay call an Operational Database, or ODb. 

An ODb is a fundamental part of how we build automations at XRay. Building automations around a robust database gives us more options for automating your workflows, and enables low-code automation to support businesses of any size with a reliable automated infrastructure.

In this post, we’ll explain how an ODb extends the functionality of your automations, bridges separate workflows together seamlessly, and helps you to keep track of all your automated activity. 

What is an ODb?

An ODb is a centralized database that manages data flowing in and out of your automations. It’s a fundamental part of an automated infrastructure, simultaneously logging metadata about each automation and feeding them with the data they need to perform useful tasks. 

At XRay, we use Airtable to create ODbs for our own automations and for our clients. Airtable is a database application with extensive options for syncing, filtering, and reformatting data. 

An ODb adds functionality to every automation

On their own, no-code/low-code platforms like Zapier and Integromat are impressive tools that let you connect apps to automate your workflows in all sorts of helpful ways. However, every platform has its limits, and using the basic features of Zapier alone won’t cut it for most businesses.

Perform complex database lookups

Using an ODb lets automators go beyond the limits of automation platforms and build more sophisticated workflows. For instance, while Zapier does include the ability to add lookup tables to an automation, it only allows for records that consist of a single key-value pair. Additionally, each table can only be accessed from within that automation.

Using an ODb, you can perform lookups with unlimited complexity and access the same database from any automation. You can find a client, their project type, start date, assigned team members - whatever data you want to store, collect, and reference. No limits, and no redundancies. 

Control when automations run

You can also use an ODb to precisely control and adjust the conditions that trigger an automation to run. Airtable lets you create different “views” that only contain records in the database that meet a certain, specific set of criteria. From there, Zapier allows you to trigger automations whenever a new record appears in a specific view. By combining the two, you can use views to control exactly when your automations trigger, and change those conditions without even needing to open up Zapier or any other automation platform. 

Do more with your data

Airtable is a powerful tool in its own right, and using it as an ODb for your automations means you gain access to all of Airtable’s functionality for working with your data. Airtable supports an extensive arsenal of formulas to reformat data, mathematical calculations, and flexible “mini-extensions” to run useful scripts. 

Data entry is one of the most common targets for automation, so it’s always helpful to have more ways to manipulate and process the data involved in your automations. 

Connect automations together with an ODb

With an ODb, data flows in both directions. As we mentioned earlier, each automation can perform lookups and reference data stored in your ODB.

But each automation can also feed data into your ODb, letting you gather more data each time your automations run. The two-way flow of data makes it easier for you to connect each automation you build to previously established workflows.

Each automation leads into the next

For instance, imagine that you’ve built an automation to support your inbound lead handling process (as we’ve done for our member Squared Away). This automation would collect lots of data about each lead that goes through your system, like their name, company name, project, project start date, point of contact email, etc. 

All of that data about your leads will be stored in your ODb as your automations run, without you needing to take any time to enter it manually. So if you want to build another automation that would benefit from using the same data, like a client onboarding automation, it can pull the necessary information right from your ODb. You don’t need to start from square one and build a new database to support the new automation. You can just a few more fields, and you’re good to go. 

With an ODb, automations are just siloed, self-contained tools. They all connect together, forming a larger infrastructure that can support actions across different teams and departments around your entire company. 

Monitor automated activity with your ODb

When you integrate several automations into your key business processes, it’s important to be able to keep track of what those automations are doing. 

As your automations run, they’ll populate the ODb with important metadata: a timestamp of when each automation ran, links to edit the automation in Zapier or Integromat, links to any files or they’ve created, and more.

With an ODb, it’s easier to keep tabs on all of your automated activity, even if you’re using several different automation platforms. Paired with some simple tools like chat notifications, your ODb will help you and your team to be aware of everything your automations are doing, so you don’t need to worry about accidentally performing redundant work or missing critical messages that your automations are sending. 

Track KPMs through automation 

You can also use your ODb’s activity log to track the performance of your automations and your team. You’ll be able to see at a glance how many times your automations run, how often you’re completing your automated processes, and how much time you’re saving through automation. 

Whatever processes you automate will inherently be tracked in the database. If you automate inbound lead handling, you’ll be able to see how many leads are coming in and what your conversion rate is. If you automate 

So if you want more visibility into your company’s KPMs, automation with a centralized database is a simple way to achieve it. 

Lay the groundwork to scale your automations and gather key metrics

At XRay, we build all of our clients’ automations around an Operational Database. Even if you start with a small, simple automation focused on saving time for a single person, building with an ODb from the beginning will achieve three critical things:

1. It will extend the functionality of each individual automation

2. It will let you build automations that connect to each other, seamlessly sharing and reusing data

3. It will let you keep track of what your automations are doing, and how they’re helping you to save time and boost output. 

If you’d like to learn more about how XRay designs and builds automated workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

‍

‍

Database icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

Every company has limited resources to work with, and getting the most out of those resources is a top priority for many. 

You can’t always find additional staff or make more time in the day, so finding ways to increase productivity and efficiency is critical. 

Automation is one of the best ways to optimize your company’s talent, their time, and their skills, and it’s becoming more accessible than ever. But with many choices for automation, it might not be clear how to get started or what approach to take. Should you be using tools like Zapier and Integromat to start automating your workflows, or are you better off developing an application to streamline your process? 

In this post, we’ll explain why no-code and low-code automation is a better use of your company’s resources than creating custom automation software. 

Developing custom software is lengthy and expensive

Custom software can be an appealing solution for workflow automation, but it can also come with a lot of issues that you might not have anticipated. From the initial cost of building your automation to finding engineers to maintain it, custom software is going to eat up a significant amount of your resources.

High cost of custom software

Software development is almost always a costly endeavour. If you’re working with a development agency or contractors, your price tag can easily run into $50k, $100K or more just for the initial build of your project. 

Developing the software internally won’t be cheap, either. If you’re using your internal engineering staff to build automations, you’ll likely be consuming the time and attention of some of your best-paid employees who could be working on more urgent tasks. While they’re developing automations for your internal systems, they won’t have as much time to work on client projects and directly generate value for the company. 

Long build times

Software development is a lengthy process. Building any product, whether it’s an app designed for customers or an automation for internal use, can often take months or years to finish. Any changes along the way can cause delays and push the timeline back even further. 

Complex maintenance

Once it’s built, your software will need constant updates to keep performing at the same level as it does on Day 1. It will need security updates to patch up any vulnerabilities that emerge, and feature updates as you refine the application to suit your company’s needs. 

All of these updates will require a developer, and will only add to the cost of your software. 

Ultimately, unless you’re selling the application to your customers or clients, developing custom software is likely not going to be a cost-effective or quick way to start automating your workflows. It might be necessary if your company operates in a highly specific niche, but in most cases, no-code and low-code automation will be a better use of your limited resources.

Automating with no-code and low-code platforms is more affordable and faster

What is no-code/low-code automation?

If you’re not familiar with the term, no-code and low-code automation is all about connecting two or more apps together to build automations, all while writing very little code - or none at all. Several no-code/low-code platforms are available today, with Zapier and Integromat being two of the most popular and widely used. Each platform has its own specialties, but they all operate on similar principles.

To build a no-code or low-code automation, you start by identifying a “trigger” event in one of the apps you’re already using. Then, you add “actions” that should be performed automatically whenever that trigger happens.

For instance, you might set New meeting in Google Calendar as your trigger, and send a Slack message as your first action. With that setup, you can have an automated Slack message sent to you with key meeting information whenever one is added to your calendar.

No-code/low-code automations can get much more complex from there as you add more steps, filters, and logic, but simple automations are often a great place to start. 

What’s the difference between no-code and low-code?

No-code automations are built without needing to write a single line of code. Instead, everything is done through a simple UI, where you can select items from menus and enter data without any special syntax or formatting. Zapier excels as a fully no-code platform, though it does have low-code capabilities as well. 

Low-code automations are still mostly built through a UI, but they can also include a few lines of code for things like API calls, looping, or other more advanced functions. They require some technical knowledge, but you don’t need to be a software developer to build a low-code automation. Integromat is a more robust platform for building low-code automations.

Since the two are so similar, we tend to group them as a single concept: no-code/low-code. 

No-code/low-code is an affordable way to automate

Compared with the 5- or 6-figure cost of building a custom application, no-code/low-code automation is a much cheaper solution. Subscriptions to platforms like Zapier and Integromat start at around $20/mo, and even their most expensive plans for enterprise users are only a few hundred per month. Even at the most expensive tiers, no-code/low-code is a fraction of the cost of custom software development. 

Start building faster with no-code and low-code

A simple automation like connecting your Google Calendar to Slack can be easily built within a day. More complex automations could take a few weeks to set up, particularly if you want to accommodate several different scenarios with a single automation. 

In any case, you can get a no-code/low-code solution up and running much faster than you can get a functional MVP ready for a custom app. The timeframe for low-code will usually be in weeks or a few months, while software development will be several months or over a year. 

Low-code means low maintenance

With no-code/low-code, maintenance is (mostly) not your problem. If you’ve got a Zapier automation connecting Hubspot and Quickbooks, each app’s developer will maintain and update their software as needed. Hubspot and Quickbooks will handle their own updates, and Zapier’s team will make sure everything still connects. 

Of course, you may want to change how your automation works after testing it out and seeing how it performs with real world data. You’ll need to make any feature updates or changes yourself when building a no-code/low-code automation, but making edits is much simpler when you don’t have to write extensive code to get it done. 

‍

Anyone can learn no-code and low-code automation

At XRay, we encourage everyone to build automations that can streamline their workday. While our experienced technicians take charge in building automations for our clients, everyone on our team has been able to create an automation that helps them out, from project managers and designers to content writers and administrators. 

Anyone on your team can learn how to build, maintain, and edit low-code automations. Of course, if you’d rather keep your team focused on their current disciplines, automation specialists like XRay can always help to automate your workflows. Even if you’re working with an outside company for automation, it’s still a huge benefit to be able to understand how the automations work, and to be able to make small updates yourself. 

Make the most of your resources with no-code/low-code automation

Whether you’re working with in-house developers or through an agency, custom software development can be a lengthy and expensive way to automate your workflows which can be difficult to update and maintain. 

For most companies, low-code/no-code automation is a better use of your resources. It’s faster to get set up, the cost is more affordable, and it’s easier to maintain. Plus, you can train your own team to work with low-code automations or even do it yourself. 

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

No-code and low-code automation is a great way to boost productivity at your workplace and give your team more time to focus on important tasks. 

If you’ve dabbled with tools like Zapier, Integromat, or Unito, then you’ve seen firsthand how they can easily connect one app to another to start automating your workflows. 

However, you might be wondering how these platforms are actually able to do this. How can they work with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of apps and access so many commands and functions?

It all comes down to Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. In this post, we’ll give you a quick overview of what an API is, and how automation platforms use them to let you build workflows. 

What is an API?

An API is an interface that lets apps and programmers issue commands to a piece of software. An API for any given application includes a list of commands defined by that application’s developers. If you’re using a project management app, its API would likely include commands for creating and editing tasks, getting information about tasks, and deleting tasks. 

One of the main uses of an API is to facilitate communication between the frontend of an app that a user interacts with, and the backend that stores data and runs calculations. Clicking on a button to create a new document in an app like Google Drive will send a command to the backend via the API to create a “document” object with all of the required attributes. All of this communication happens behind the scenes; users only have to interact with the simplified, abstracted UI to make everything work. 

But APIs aren’t just about connecting the two sides of an application; they also grant access to external applications and developers. By consulting the API’s public documentation, a developer could write some code to issue commands to an external application. The data gathered from those commands might let a web developer add a Twitter widget to their site that shows new tweets with a certain hashtag in real time. 

Developers make APIs and often provide thorough public documentation because they want their apps to be accessible, but to keep things secure, they don’t want to expose the entirety of the software to the internet. An API lets the frontend communicate with the backend, and lets other apps safely connect as well. 

In a similar vein, automation platforms can also use APIs to operate applications without requiring constant user input. 

How Automation Platforms Use APIs

Automation platforms like Zapier work by essentially adding a simple, user-friendly graphical interface to API calls.

Instead of consulting technical documentation and searching for the functions and parameters that you need to specify to create a new channel in Slack, Zapier provides you with a series of dropdown menus and plain language instructions to let you assemble an API call. 

‍

All you have to do is to select the app you want to use, the action you want to perform, and enter some basic data like the channel name. 

In other words, no-code platforms like Zapier let you use an API without needing to know any code at all. 

Because no-code platforms leverage APIs to create automations, this means they can support hundreds or even thousands of apps. Any program with a publicly documented API could be added to a no-code platform, and a quick search on XRay.Tools will show you that Zapier has added support for many of them. 

With the extensive functionality of API calls and the vast array of available applications, no-code platforms give everyone the power to build useful tools without needing to have any programming experience whatsoever. 

So if you want to start building a new tool to speed up your workflows, you don’t need to immediately start looking for developers and software engineers to get it done. In many cases, no-code automation tools will provide everything you need to start automating the tedious parts of your workflows. 

Once you get started, you can also start learning a little bit of code to take your automations further. This will let you write API calls within Zapier or Integromat, add loops or other useful functions, all while staying within a familiar platform. Techniques like these mark the difference between “no-code” and “low-code”. Both focus on using existing tools to create apps and automations, but low-code requires a little more technical knowledge and experience. 

‍

Start Building Automated Workflows Without Learning Code

The structure of modern software has made it possible for no-coders to do more than ever. The no-code and low-code space is growing every day, with apps like Zapier, Unito, Integromat, Coupler and more giving everyone the ability to leverage APIs and build tools that enhance your workflows. 

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

How to Make an API Call in Zapier

If you’ve been dabbling in no-code and low-code automation, then you’ve probably already used Zapier to set up a few simple automations. 

While Zapier excels as an intuitive, no-code platform, it also has the ability to perform some useful low-code functions that let you do more with your automations. 

In this post, we’ll show you one of the most practical low-code functions that Zapier supports: making your own custom API calls. 

If you’re not familiar with the term API, you can check out our post here for a thorough explanation of what they are and why they’re important for automation. But in short, an API (Application Programming Interface) is a way to issue commands to an application without using the app’s typical user interface. These commands, usually issued by developers, let someone fetch data from the app, create new data, or edit existing data. 

As a low-coder, you can use API calls to add functions that Zapier doesn’t support natively. For instance, if you’re working with Asana, you may have noticed that Zapier doesn’t have an option to create a new section within a project. To do that, you’ll need to write an API call.

In this post, we’ll walk you through setting up an API call to create a new section in Asana, but the principles apply pretty well to any app and action that you want to make an API call for. So even if you’re not using Asana in your workflows, it can still be useful to follow along. 

What you’ll need

• An Asana account - a free trial will work

• A paid Zapier account - any level from “Starter” or higher will give you access to premium apps like Webhooks by Zapier

• (Optional) Airtable - we’re triggering this Zap with Airtable, but you can use any app

Creating the API Call

1. Check for an existing integration first

Before going through the trouble of making an API call, check to see if you can use pre-built integrations first.

If we check Asana integration, we see that there’s no step to add a section. That means we’ll need to make an API call in order to create a section as part of our automation. 

2. Set up the trigger

Now, you’ll need to create a Zap and add a trigger. Your trigger can be anything; in our example, we’re using a “New Record” trigger in Airtable. The record contains some information we’ll use in the API call, but you can also enter that data manually for this tutorial.

3. Add a Webhook step to create the API call

Add a new step, and choose “Webhooks by Zapier”. 

Choose your webhook’s type from the menu. POST will let you create data in the app; GET will retrieve existing data; PUT will update existing data.

Since we want to create a new section with our automation, we’ll choose POST. 

Populating the URL

Zapier will now ask you for a URL. This URL is how your webhook will actually be sent, and it needs to have some particular information to communicate properly with Asana’s API.

To figure out what you need to put into the URL for any API, it’s always best to consult the API documentation.

Most modern apps have documented APIs, so you just need to do a quick search for “{app name} API docs” to find them. 

When you open up Asana’s API documentation, you can use the search bar on the left of the screen to search for information pertaining to “sections”. 

The entry on sections has a lot of information about all the functions you can perform with sections, and what data is needed to complete the command. There’s also example code, which is extremely useful for getting started. 

To start, copy the URL from the example code. You’ll need to replace the placeholder text of “{project_gid}” with your Asana project’s actual GID. 

To find your GID, open up your Asana project in your browser, and copy the number in the URL between 0/ and /list. 

Once you’ve got your Asana GID, paste the completed URL into the field in Zapier.

Filling Out Data Fields

Under “Data”, Zapier lets you assemble a set of key-value pairs to include all of the data needed to execute your API call. 

Refer to the API documentation to find out what data you need to include here. To create a new section in Asana, the docs indicate that you only need to identify the project that the section will be created in, and the name of the section.

Since the project is already identified in the URL, you can just include a name for the section. Enter “name” into the key field, and whatever name you’d like in the value. We’ll use data from our Airtable trigger in our example, but you can enter a name from a different source, or just enter one manually. 

Adding Headers

Headers act as a sort of label for your webhook; they tell the recipient app information about the request that you’re sending. 

You’ll frequently need to include authorization data here - a simple credential check to make sure that your request is authorized to access data in your account. 

Again, check the API docs to determine what you’ll need to add here. Asana’s docs indicate that we need to include a token authorization. 

To get the authorization token, you’ll need to go to your Asana account and navigate to Settings > Apps > Manage developer apps. From there, click on “New access token”. 

Name the token and create it. Copy the token, and return to Zapier. 

Under headers, enter “Authorization” as the key. For the value field, enter “Bearer” followed by a space, and paste your token in. 

With your URL, data, and headers all filled in, you’re all set to test the automation. It should create a new section in your designated project with the name you provided. 

Push Your Zaps Further with API Calls

Now you know the basics of making an API call in Zapier, and you can start adding custom steps whenever Zapier doesn’t support exactly what you want to do. 

This post just covers some of the fundamental principles of API calls; you’ll need to do a lot of trial and error on your own to figure out the details. Just remember to always check the documentation when in doubt, and you should be able to find what you need. 

If you’d like to learn more about building low-code automations to enhance your workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Automating your workflows can often be an overwhelming concept when you’re just starting out. It can be difficult to know where to begin as you search for a way to streamline your work and organize your data across people, teams, and departments. 

As low-code automation specialists, we’ve found that the best way to launch an automation project is to start by focusing on a single individual, even if your ultimate goal is to optimize workflows for your entire team.

Building automations to support a key member of your team will be the quickest way to get results in the shorter term, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for automated workflows that will help an entire department - and eventually your whole company. 

Turn a team member’s chokepoints into checkpoints

Right now, there’s probably somebody at your company who is putting in great work on a consistent basis, but is getting overwhelmed with the volume of tasks they have to deal with every day. 

To start supporting their work with automation, you can begin by looking at your overburdened employee’s bottlenecks. What’s eating up their time? How many of their daily tasks actually leverage their unique skills and expertise, and how many are just tedious robotic work?

When you start building automations for one of your team members, you’ll immediately amplify their output. They’ll be able to spend more of their time making critical decisions and solving unique problems instead of dedicating their time to robotic tasks. 

By focusing on a single individual, you’ll be able to complete your initial automations much quicker, as you’ll only need to be concerned with one set of requirements and preferences.

However, building automations for one team member can quickly create benefits for the rest of your company as well. 

Expand your automated infrastructure to a team or department

Even when you’re building automations with just one person’s role in mind, you can still establish the beginnings of a scalable automated infrastructure. 

One of the key aspects of XRay’s strategy for building automations is to create an Operational Database from day one. An Operational Database, or ODb, is a centralized database that supports every automation at your company. It collects data from multiple sources which can then be plugged into your automations, and it stores data from your automations as they run. An ODb extends the functionality of low-code automation platforms, allowing for database lookups, precise control over automation triggers, and more. 

In short, an ODb makes your automations more capable and scalable, and it lets all of your automations use data from each other. When we start building an automation for one role at your company, we’ll also build your ODb in parallel, which makes it easy to transition from automating for a single role to automating for several. 

For example, you might start off your engagement with XRay by automating your inbound lead handling process. Your lead handling automation would send templated responses to inquiries and track the progress of each lead as they move through your funnel. 

As the automation runs, your ODb would gather key data about each lead, which could then be repurposed in future automations. All of the data about your leads could be used to support an onboarding automation, creating shared folders and Slack channels for any lead that you convert to a client. 

When all of your automated data runs through an ODb behind the scenes, you can easily expand the scope of your automations, jumping from a workflow that supports one role to workflows that support whole departments and teams. 

Scale to a company-wide automated infrastructure

As you add more automated workflows to your ODb each month, you’ll see that it naturally expands over time to support your entire company. While this will certainly help your whole team to spend less time on robotic work, the benefits will go beyond just saving time. 

When the majority of your critical processes are supported by automation, you’ll find that it's easier than ever for your team to work asynchronously. The progress of each project and task will be easily visible to everyone who needs to see it, reducing the need for ad hoc check-ins and interruptions. Files will be stored and shared consistently, making it easy for anyone to find the documents they need to get their work done. 

As full or partial remote work is becoming a standard part of business around the world, you’ll need to find ways to make your company maintain its performance when much of your team is working from different parts of the country - or different parts of the globe. 

A robust automated infrastructure will enable remote work, and it can all start with a single automation supporting a single person at your company. 

Starting small to achieve transformational results

When you first dip your toes into automation, you don’t need to try and overhaul your entire company all at once. Automating your workflows can redefine the way your whole team works, but with an ODb set up by XRay.Tech, you can get there one step at a time. 

If you’d like to learn more about how automation can save time and amplify your team’s output, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

While Zapier is often billed as an automation tool that lets you connect your various apps together, some of its most powerful and helpful features can be found in its own built-in software. 

Previously, we’ve covered some of the useful functions that you can access through Formatter by Zapier, and in this final post about the tool (for now), we’re going to take a quick look at some of what you can do with the “Numbers” operations. 

As you might have guessed, all of the functions in the numbers section let you work with numerical values, either by reformatting them or using them in mathematical calculations. In the videos below, we’ll show you three of the ways you can use the numbers functions in Formatter, but just keep in mind that there are more options than what we’re including here. Be sure to explore Formatter yourself to find additional useful tricks.

If you're interested in learning about Formatter's options for working with lists, .CSV files, and other useful actions, check out our rundown of Utilities functions in this blog post.

If you'd like to see Formatter's options for working with Text and Date/Time, check out this post.

Format Phone Number

If the output of your automation is a message or email, you want to make sure that the recipient has an easy time reading it. An unbroken string of numbers like 5551235555 might be simple enough for a computer to parse as a phone number, but a little formatting makes it much clearer for a human reader.

With the “Format Phone Number” action, you can automatically format phone numbers to include hyphens, parentheses, and other punctuation to make them easier to read. You can also use local or international formats to help accommodate your clients or colleagues around the globe. 

Just enter the phone number you want to edit, pick the new format you’d like to use, and you’re all set. 

Math Operations

Even a simple calculation can make a no-code automation much more powerful and let it save a little more time. Whether you need to calculate the total cost of your tracked hourly work, or determine the capacity for your team whenever a new client is added, some quick arithmetic is often needed to make an automation finish everything on your checklist.

With Math Operations, you can perform multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction with dynamic data from your automation, or with constant numbers entered directly into the input field. 

Just select the operation that you’d like to use, and enter your inputs one at a time. You can then test the step to see the results. This system isn’t well suited to more complex equations, but it’s very convenient when you just need to implement some simple arithmetic. 

Spreadsheet-style Formulas

Like many automators, you may already be familiar with the types of formulas provided in spreadsheet apps like Excel and Google Sheets. If you need to do some more robust calculations in your automations and you’re already comfortable with spreadsheets, then the Spreadsheet-style Formulas action in Formatter will be a helpful tool. 

Just add a new Formatter step, and choose “Numbers” and “Spreadsheet-style Formula”. Then, you can just type the formula into the provided field, using data from earlier steps as inputs if you’d like. 

If you’re not quite sure about what syntax to use for your formula, Zapier includes a link to their formula guide. Since there aren’t any dropdown or prebuilt options, it’s best to know a bit about spreadsheet style formulas before using this step. But the guide will help you to figure it out even if you’re not an Excel power user. 

Work with Numbers directly in Zapier

With automated workflows, it’s often easiest to connect apps with tools like Zapier and Integromat, and to perform any related calculations in spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Airtable. This can certainly be an effective way to build your automations, but it’s always good to know about all of the tools at your disposal. Using the Numbers functions of Formatter can let you perform calculations and format numbers entirely within your Zaps.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use Zapier and other no-code tools to automate your workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

What do you do when the data you’re working with in Zapier isn’t quite right? 

Maybe the text isn’t capitalized correctly, or you’ve got a whole bunch of extra text when the only thing you’re looking for is an email address. Maybe you want to split up the items in a list, or you just want to make a date look a little more readable.

The answer to all of these problems and more is “Formatter by Zapier”, one of the most useful tools in the no-code automation platform’s toolbelt. 

In the videos below, we’ll show you several different ways to transform data with Formatter. This is only a sample of what formatter can do, and we encourage you to explore the other options yourself. You can also leave us a comment if there’s another technique you’d like us to create a walkthrough for. 

Make a New Formatter by Zapier Step

To use any of the techniques in our videos, just create a new action in your Zap and search for “Formatter by Zapier” or select it from the menu on the right. 

Choose one of the four available actions to start configuring your formatter step: Text, Numbers, Utility, or Date/Time.

Each of the actions will contain several specific operations that you can use to format your data.

Text Transformations

These steps alter text in your data, and can be used by selecting “Text” as your action when you make a new formatter step. 

Capitalization

There are multiple options in formatter for changing the case of your text. You can use “Capitalize” to capitalize the first letter of each word, “Titlecase” to capitalize based on title case rules, “Lowercase” to make every letter lowercase, and so on. 

‍

Extract URLs, Email Addresses, or Numbers

The text formatter includes several “Extract” operations that will find the first URL, email address, or number in the provided text. Just pick the option that suits what you’re looking for. 

‍

Extract Pattern - Regex

If you’re looking for something more specific than what the preset “extract” functions can do, you can also use regex to extract any pattern you want with the “Extract Pattern” function.

Regex, or regular expressions, is a way of searching text for specific character patterns. You can use it to find every word that starts with the letter “a”, or every word that starts with the letter “a”, doesn’t end in the letter “t” and is at least four letters. You can get as specific as you’d like.

Using regex can be pretty tricky, and definitely qualifies as “low-code” rather than “no-code”. If you’d like to learn more about regex, you can check out this guide from developer Mozilla.

You can also visit Regex101 to get more info about regex and test your expressions.  

Split Text

The Split Text function lets you take a piece of text and split it into separate pieces of data. You can use it to break up each item in a comma-separated list, or each word in a sentence. 

‍

Date/Time

Date/Time transformations give you extensive options for working with dates in your automations. You can reformat complicated timestamps to more human-readable layouts, calculate the time between two dates, add or subtract time to a date, and more.

Reformat Date and Time

As you're building no-code automations, the apps you use will often give you ugly, lengthy date and time data. Check out this video for a quick primer on reformatting date/time in Zapier.

Add or Subtract Date/Time Values

Need to calculate how much time passed between two dates? Just select "Add/Subtract Time" to get started.

‍

Numbers

Formatter's "Numbers" transformations let you perform mathematic calculations and much more. You can use functions from Numbers to format numeric data, run spreadsheet-style operations, and more.

Check out our rundown of Numbers functions in this blog post.

Utilities

Formatter’s Utilities functions give you a few additional ways to work with your data. They’ll let you import a .CSV, add line items to a list, pick an item randomly from a list, and more. 

Check out our rundown of Utilities functions in this blog post.

Control your data precisely with Formatter

We can’t always control the data that comes into our automations. User-entered text in website forms or automatically gathered metrics won’t always be neat and tidy on its own. 

Whether you need to perform some vital calculations to make your automations work, or just want to add an extra level of polish with correct capitalization, Formatter by Zapier will let you exercise more control over the data in your automations. 

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

As you’re exploring your options in the low-code automation space, you’ll likely come across companies like XRay and independent freelancers alike. 

While freelancers will typically offer a lower price for their services, an XRay membership provides a better service for organizations trying to save time and refine their workflows at scale. 

In this post, we’ll explain how XRay differs from freelancers and why our pricing structure is different. We hope that this information will make it easier for you to decide which approach is best for automating workflows at your company. 

XRay’s Expert Technician Team 

At XRay, our team of automation technicians incorporates a wide range of skills and experience. Each tech has their own specialities that they bring to the team, giving us a comprehensive set of techniques to apply to each member’s projects.

‍

Some of our technicians are experts at Zapier, while others excel at building automations in Integromat. Some are highly technical low-coders who write custom API calls to build complex automations, and others are focused on business operations and can design automations to fit any use case. 

Rather than simply assigning one tech to each client, our membership model lets us rotate our personnel as needed. When we identify new goals with one of our members, we can easily swap in the techs with the right skill set to match the software, use case, or technical challenge of the project. 

Freelancers tend to work solo or with a couple of colleagues, and often have a narrower range of expertise. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself; if you know you just want to build a Zapier automation for Hubspot, a freelancer specializing in Zapier and Hubspot can certainly help you out. 

However, if you find that you want to start expanding your automation into workflows beyond Hubspot and start exploring automations that may require custom API calls or different platforms, you’ll be better off with the flexibility of an XRay membership. 

Go Beyond Simple Automations with an Automated Infrastructure

At XRay, we don’t just build automations in isolation. Starting from the very first automation that we create for each of our members, we connect every workflow to an Operational Database (ODb). The ODb gathers data each time an automation is triggered and feeds that data into automations as needed. 

Using an ODb as an intermediary step in between two applications enables us to build automations that wouldn't be possible by connecting the apps directly, and it lets us collect data that can be used to support any number of future automations. 

‍

For instance, one of our members might start out by automating Hubspot to notify their sales team whenever a deal is updated. We could extend this automation to also send a message to accounting whenever a deal is actually closed, and have a summary of the sales figures sent to the leadership team each week in a report. 

Ultimately, using an ODb from the start lets us accommodate many of the automations our members will want to build in the future, and contributes to creating a complete automated infrastructure rather than just building a series of separate Zaps and integrations. 

While techniques and strategies will vary based on each individual, freelancers typically work on a per-project basis and generally won’t be able to build a system comparable to XRay’s ODb. Again, this approach may suit you just fine if you’re only looking to build an automation or two, but it won’t be sufficient if you’re hoping to automate workflows across your entire company. 

Documentation for Ease of Use, Data to Uncover Insights

An automation is only useful if your team knows how and when to use it - or when they know it’s running in the background without any manual input required. 

At XRay, our techs provide detailed documentation with each automated workflow to explain what each automation is, how it works, and how to use it. We’ll also include video walkthroughs to illustrate more complicated workflows step-by-step. 

‍

We share all of our documentation through the Workflow Dash, an app we’ve developed and include for free in all of our membership plans. The Workflow Dash organizes links like our Notion documentation into easily accessible Pins, which let you view web content right inside the Dash. We’ll also include any forms, surveys, or other resources you need to trigger your automations. 

While any good freelancer will certainly do their best to make sure you understand the automation they’ve built for you, they won’t be able to offer something like the Workflow Dash that organizes and contextualizes all of the information you need to operate your automations. 

Your Choice

If you’re working on a tighter budget, or if you only have a small, specific project in mind, then a freelancer may be a better fit for your automation plans. However, if you want to build automated workflows that touch every aspect of your organization, an XRay membership is likely going to be the better choice. 

If you’d like to learn more about how XRay builds automations to create more mindful time, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. You can also reach out to us at any time if you have questions.

One of the biggest misconceptions about automation is that automating your systems would  dramatically change your business processes. 

If your workflows are getting the results that you want, then a good automation should support your workflows rather than replacing them. 

In this post, we’ll quickly show you how XRay’s approach to automation makes it easier to do what you’re already doing. We’ll also point you to some of our more in-depth articles that can help you to decide what you should and shouldn’t automate at your business.

If It's Not Broken, Don’t Fix It

If you already have a lot of workflows that work great for you, then the last thing we want to do is to disrupt those for the sake of building an automation. 

Completely reshaping your processes would only make it harder for you and your team to adopt the new automations, creating totally unnecessary obstacles as you try to scale your business.

What’s more, fundamentally changing the way your processes work could result in an inferior output. Using automations to save time only makes sense if you can preserve or improve the final result; otherwise you’re just trading time for quality. 

Our aim is to help you identify the most repeatable and consistent processes that you use every day and to enhance them with automated steps.

Let the Robots Handle the Robotic Tasks

So how do we know which steps to automate in your workflow? To put it simply, we look for the tasks that are already robotic in nature, while leaving you and your team to keep pursuing the mindful tasks that really require human attention.

At XRay, we have a simple set of criteria to determine whether a task is robotic or mindful: C.A.S.T. 

Is the task in question creative, analytical, strategic, or thoughtful? If so, it’s probably better left to the capable hands and mind of a human being. You generally wouldn’t want a piece of software designing your website, or setting the mission and vision for a new project. 

On the other hand, if a task doesn’t meet any of the C.A.S.T. criteria, then it’s likely a robotic task and a good candidate for automation.

Many of the most common robotic tasks essentially consist of moving data from one place to another: updating a database and a CRM to reflect the latest invoices received in Quickbooks, or sending a message to notify one of your colleagues about a client email.

Automated software can perform robotic tasks just as well as a human could, and can do so faster and with fewer errors. That’s why we focus our automation efforts on robotic tasks first and foremost. 

How Automation Works: Turning a 10-Step Process into 3 Actions

Let’s imagine a 10-step process that’s part of a company’s onboarding workflow.

1. Supervisor drafts a templated welcome email, including an open invitation for the new hire to ask questions as needed
2. Supervisor finds department- or role-specific onboarding material for the new hire and sends it over email
3. Supervisor creates first tasks for the new hire in Asana, Basecamp, etc.
4. Administrator sends email asking new hire for contact info
5. Administrator after the new hire responds, copy and paste the information into the company directory
6. HR sends new hire the employee handbook
7. HR creates task to read the employee handbook
8. New hire poses questions sporadically to supervisor
9. Supervisor checks in sporadically with new hire
10. New hire checks off all tasks as complete, and notifies supervisor
    

If a client came to us with a workflow like this, we would recommend automating several steps so that they complete the work more efficiently and consistently. 

Instead of drafting the email and creating all of those tasks manually, the supervisor could fill out one simple form that will kick off a series of automations. The automations would then locate the necessary docs for the new hire based on their role, send them a welcome message, and create all of their onboarding tasks.

At each step of the way, the automation would announce its actions in the relevant messaging channels (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.), making sure the supervisor, admin, and new hire are all kept in the loop without any of them having to write out updates themselves. 

The automation-supported process might look something like this:

1. Supervisor fills out a short “New Hire Onboarding” form
2. 🤖 -  Sends email to the new hire with department- and role-specific documents, and links a form for any questions
3. 🤖 - Creates tasks for the new hire in the company’s project management software
4. 🤖 - Sends the new hire an email asking for contact information, with the admin CC’d
5. 🤖 - Copies the new hire’s response into the company directory
6. 🤖 - Sends new hire the employee handbook
7. 🤖 - Creates task to read the employee handbook
8. New hire - submits questions in the designated form
9. 🤖 - Updates supervisor on the new hire’s onboarding progress
10. New hire - checks off all tasks as complete. Supervisor automatically notified
    

The structure of the process stays the same, and all of the same work is completed, but now, humans only have to manually complete three of the steps instead of all ten. 

Everyone involved will have that much more time to focus on their important work, instead of looking for documents or sending notifications that could be automatic. 

If you’d like to learn more about how XRay can help you to automate your onboarding process - or any workflow loaded with robotic tasks - reach out to us at any time.

If you want 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.

There are only three things that everyone does every day at work. No matter what your job is or where you're employed, you are always either (1) preparing to work, (2) doing your work, or (3) communicating with someone (or something) about the work. 📈📉📊

You might start your day opening all of the software you'll need, logging in, and reading over directions from a client or supervisor. That's preparing to work. Then, you do the work itself - in other words, the stuff you get paid to do. For a programmer, it's writing code; for a chef, it's making food. Then, you let the relevant people know that your work is done; a to-do box is checked, and an order is served. ✅🍱

When we refer to "Business Processes", we're talking about everything you do as you go through these three types of activity at work. From signing deals and setting a schedule to actually performing the work and getting paid - they’re all business processes. In this post, we'll talk about three different categories of business processes, and how defining your processes can help you to focus more on generating value, and less on mindless, repetitive tasks. You're probably spending a lot of time right now on preparing to work and reporting your work, and we want to show you how you can reduce that - or even eliminate it altogether. 🤓

This post is part of a series about the Company XRay, a method for creating more mindful time at work. If this is the first that you’re hearing about XRay, you should check out our first post on the topic, which gives a high-level overview of the concept. In our last post, we took a deep dive into choosing and deploying software tools, which you can read here.

Now, let’s start by considering value processes.

Value Processes

Value processes are the activities that generate revenue for your business and are the reason that your company exists. These processes are the work itself, rather than preparing to work or reporting it. For designers, value processes would be the creative steps required to generate a design; for a baker, they would be the steps to mixing ingredients for baking. A business that doesn’t optimize their value process probably won’t stick around very long. Who wants to hire a design firm that can’t make a smooth UX, or a baker that makes bland cakes? No one.

Ultimately, improving your value processes relies on your human abilities. This is human work that relies on quality, creativity, and uniqueness. It's made up of what we call 'C.A.S.T.' tasks; tasks that are creative, analytical, strategic, or thoughtful. C.A.S.T. tasks, and the value processes that they support, need to be done by humans. Accomplishing your value processes is the primary goal of your company, and it's where you should be able to focus most of your time and resources. If you're an engineer, artist, manager, SDR, or any other type of knowledge worker, I'm talking about focus and flow time; the 30-60 minutes you have a day where no one interrupts you, you're focused on the task at hand, and the time seems to fly by; or finally slow down. Being in a flow state is the best way to accomplish your value processes.

However, you'll often find that you end up spending a great deal of time on logistical processes - activities that support your value processes, but don't create value themselves.

You may be restricting your value processes' capacity by neglecting your logistical processes. Every hour spent on paperwork, scheduling, and data look-ups is a context switch that could be spent on the work that actually defines your business and brings in revenue. By taking some time now to define, optimize, and automate your logistical processes, you can devote more of your time and energy to what matters in the long run.

Logistical Processes

Logistical processes are where the average business is going to have the most room for optimization. Logistical processes are all the things you do to keep your business going that don’t directly create value or translate to revenue. You can think of them as the work between the work: they’re the emails you send to let people know that you’ve finished something; the links you need to find to get the right hex codes for your client’s brand colors from the test campaign; the repetitive information that you log specifically to copy and paste. Logistical processes are vital to the survival of your business, but they’re not what you’re getting paid for. It’s perhaps because they fall outside of our areas of expertise that we tend to have sloppy, ill-defined methods and procedures for getting the bs work out of the way of the real work.

When you have issues in your value creation process, it's usually going to be obvious to you and your clients. If your designs are confusing, or if the food you make tastes bad, you'll probably hear about it right away. It can be harder to detect the flaws in your logistical processes. By their nature, flawed logistical processes are poorly-defined and create unnecessary ambiguity. They fail to communicate the necessary information to the relevant people at the right time. When you have messy logistical processes, you might have finished work awaiting review without anyone knowing that it's ready for their feedback. You might have a client who's out of the loop because they weren't added to all of the right communication channels. Even if the work itself is good, the perception of your work will suffer if the logistical processes are causing delays, miscommunication, or are forcing you to redo work.

One of the main goals of the XRay Method is to help companies define and streamline their logistical processes, and even to automate them whenever possible. According to a McKinsey study, workers spend about 19% of their day searching for and gathering information. The study also notes that just creating a simple searchable database for internal company info can reduce that time by 35%. Assembling the right information in order to perform work are the robotic tasks we target. We want to remove them from human workflows, so that people at your company can focus on tasks that deserve their attention and skill, and frankly, make money.

Logistical processes can (and we believe will) be standardized by entity type, business model, geography and more. While value processes can be highly specific to each company, logistical processes can often be applicable to many different companies in different industries. A pizza chef and a sushi chef might not have a lot in common when it comes to making their respective dishes, but they both need to pay their employees in the same way - and it’s not all that different from how a bookstore or a design studio has to pay their employees. Hence the invention of HR software like Zenefits, JustWorks, BambooHR, and others.

By documenting a standard procedure and automating it wherever possible, you give your team more time to focus on revenue-generating activities and avoid the mistakes and confusion that hamper their work every day.

Outlier Processes

Outlier processes are, as their name suggests, a little bit different. An outlier process is any activity that hasn’t typically been part of your business, but that you’re now undertaking. Maybe a client asks for a service that you haven’t offered before, and you’ve agreed to try it out rather than losing the client to another firm. Maybe you've started using a new piece of software, and you need to learn the ins and outs of it and decide whether or not to keep using it.

Whatever the case may be, it’s inevitable that you’ll run into some outlier processes eventually. No business continues to do exactly the same thing day in, day out forever. Sometimes, these new processes can be a great opportunity to create more value or streamline a process. When that happens, the outlier could become a new norm. In other cases, the outlier process might just be a distraction that takes up more resources than it’s worth. 

So how do you tell the difference? How can you distinguish between innovation and a waste of time? You can’t always predict what’s going to happen, so the best thing to do is to be methodical and treat each new process as an experiment. When an outlier process arises, document everything that you can! You should have a record of who’s doing what, for how long, the resources they’re using, the results of their work, and any revenue or other value that you can attribute to the process.

Don’t be afraid to say no. In many cases, it’s not worth it to devote time and resources to a new service or product or other activity if it simply doesn’t align with your business goals.

However, if you decide that the outlier process is something that should be a regular part of your business, make sure to analyze it the same way that you’ve done so far with your existing value and logistical processes. When you’re doing something new for the first time, odds are that you won’t be doing it the most efficient way possible. You’ll probably have people doing some redundant tasks, and will likely accomplish most of it manually. Go back and define the value and logistical processes that make up this new process, and find the robotic tasks that you can take off of your (and your employees’) hands.

Outlier Processes are the gradual change agents that let our organizations grow, mature, and evolve over time. There are constantly new challenges arising among your various company functions. Handling an outlier opportunity well typically results in a messy-but-effective first version of getting something done, which could evolve into an entirely new value prop. 

Action Steps

Value processes, logistical processes and outlier processes are a part of every business. It’s important to define and analyze your processes from time to time, and consider where your responsibilities fall. How are you spending your time? Are you stuck in one silo, or reactively running between the three?

Here's how you can find the robotic tasks in your workflow and start automating them.

Step 1: List Your Value Processes and Obstacles

First, write down one of your company’s value processes that you would like to focus on. Next, consider the process that you named and identify potential bottlenecks. What can prevent you or your employees from completing this value process efficiently and effectively? What gets in the way of delivering results on time and at the level of quality that you strive for? When you list these obstacles, there’s a good chance you’ll find that many of them relate to your logistical processes; the preparation necessary to do work, or the communication that work was done. 

Step 2: List Your Logistical Processes

Next, list out your logistical processes as they relate to delivering or communicating the value process you identified. Document about three of the activities that support this value process, but aren’t directly related to generating revenue. Your list might include processes for onboarding and training new employees, record keeping, payroll procedures, systems for adhering to legal regulation, etc. 

For each logistical process that you’ve identified, write out all of the tasks required to complete it. It’s possible that a lot of your activities won’t have a documented procedure in place. If that’s the case, just write down how you or your team did it last time. One of the benefits of going through the XRay method is that you’ll clear up ambiguity in your processes and create valuable documentation of how you’re getting things done. Even though you won’t be able to automate everything, you’ll be able to spot redundant activities and help your team to be more productive the next time someone 'new' comes in.

Step 3: Identify Robotic Tasks

Once you have each of your logistical processes listed out, it’s time to find the robotic tasks in the list - the tasks that you will be able to automate. Look for anything in the list that involves people simply moving information from one place to another without modifying it. Look for repetitive tasks that should be essentially the same every time. Look for the tasks that are all about one-way communication; tasks that just keep someone (or several people) in the loop rather than starting a collaborative effort or conversation. All of these kinds of tasks can and should be handled through automation. Make a list of those tasks, so you can start planning to automate them.

If you’d like help designing and building automations for your robotic tasks, feel free to contact us for more info.

‍

‍

‍

As an XRay membership continues, we’ll often reach a point where our members want to shift focus away from building new automations and instead concentrate on fine-tuning their existing workflows.

We understand that your company’s needs and goals will change over time, which is why we offer maintenance packages that let our members keep working with us at lower cost when they need to pause construction on new automated workflows. 

In this article, we’ll give you a brief overview of what we offer in our maintenance packages. If you would like to see pricing information or if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly by clicking on “Contact”. 

Maintenance Packages Overview

With a maintenance package, you’ll be able to keep using all of your automations just as you did during your full membership. Whenever you run into a bug or error, we’ll address it. If you want to make some small updates to your automations, a maintenance plan will let you get it done at a reduced rate. 

All of XRay’s maintenance plans include the following core features:

Support for any automations we’ve already built

The primary goal of switching to a maintenance plan is to focus on the automations that are already in your portfolio. With that in mind, all of our maintenance plans include support for any automation that we already delivered to you with a completed Process Page. Each automation will already be configured to alert us to any errors that crop up. Just reach out to us on Slack to get started. 

Credits for hourly work, and a reduced hourly rate

Each maintenance membership includes credits for a certain amount of hourly work at no additional charge, and a reduced hourly rate after those credits are already used up. 

Continued access to premium software

We use the best tools in the industry to build your low-code automations, and every maintenance membership will let you continue to access the premium and enterprise software that we use at a fraction of the cost. 

Benefits of Higher-Tier Maintenance Plans

Every maintenance plan will provide you with the core services listed above, but each package also includes some unique benefits. 

More hours of service, better hourly rates

Higher tiers of maintenance plans will include additional credits for hourly work on your automations, as well as a further reduced rate for any work beyond your credited hours.  

Support for more complicated automations

Though we strive to use no-code and low-code tools for every automated workflow, technical restraints will sometimes require us to use more advanced software and techniques. Any automated workflows that use API calls, custom integrations, or full applications built by XRay will only be supported by higher tier maintenance plans.

Limited feature updates for current automations

While the main focus of a maintenance plan is to keep everything running as-is, higher tiers also include time for smaller feature updates or changes. These changes will allow you to tweak your automations based on the real-world data you gather from using them every day. 

Bugs and Errors vs. Changes and Updates

All of XRay’s maintenance work will fall under of one of two categories: 

1. Bugs and Errors

2. Changes and Updates

Each maintenance plan allots different amounts of time and different hourly rates for these two types of work, so it’s important to understand the distinction. 

Bug and Error Fixing

Bug and error fixing describes any work that we do to keep your automations running as intended when your full XRay membership ends. Whatever state your automation was in when you switched over to maintenance membership is the state that we’ll strive to preserve. 

For example, imagine that one of your automated workflows is supposed to send a Slack message to your head of accounting whenever you mark a deal as “Closed/Won” in Hubspot. If that Slack message suddenly stops getting sent, then addressing that issue would count as bug and error fixing. 

Changes and Updates

Any modifications to your automations beyond their intended, documented scope will fall into the category of changes and updates. If you want to alter how your automation is triggered or what any of its actions do, those will typically be considered changes or updates.

For instance, let’s consider our hypothetical Husbpot-Slack automation again. If you want to send the message to the accounting channel instead of your accounting department head, or if you want to send the notification in an email instead of a Slack message, those would be “changes and updates”. 

Whenever you come to us with a request during your maintenance membership, we’ll let you know as soon as possible if the work you’re proposing is a bug fix or an update. If you find that you want a lot of updates, we’ll likely recommend that you start up a membership again. 

Note: pricing listed above is an estimate, and subject to change based on the technical complexity of your automations and other factors. Please reach out to XRay directly for a specific quote for your maintenance membership.

Choose the plan that works for you

At XRay, our goal is to save time for our members and help them improve their processes along the way. We know that each business is going to have different needs and priorities, so we offer flexible maintenance plans to help our members as their focus shifts away from new automations. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we work with our members, or if you’d like some quick automation tips and tutorials, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Choose the plan that works for you

At XRay, our goal is to save time for our members and help them improve their processes along the way. We know that each business is going to have different needs and priorities, so we offer flexible maintenance plans to help our members as their focus shifts away from new automations. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we work with our members, or if you’d like some quick automation tips and tutorials, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

If you’re looking into automating workflows but you’re not sure if your software will be able to support it, don’t worry: in most cases, you won’t have to switch to different apps just to start automating. 

With low-code platforms and expert automators, you can automate just about any software that you want to use. 

Since most tools can be automated, our approach at XRay is to let our members decide whether they want to stick with the software they’re already using, or if they want to make a switch. 

In this brief post, we’ll explain how we’re able to work with a wide variety of software, and how automating your systems can actually make it easier to switch to new platforms in the future. 

Automation Happens on the Backend

In a previous post, we demonstrated how platforms like Zapier and Integromat leverage publicly accessible APIs to build automations. You can read that post for more detailed information, but essentially, Zapier sends a command to the app’s API, which in turn prompts the backend to perform the requested actions and calculations. 

Since we rarely use the frontend or interface of the applications that we automate, we’re primarily concerned with the data that our automation platforms get from each app’s backend. More often than not, the data that we can pull from two competitor apps is really quite similar. 

We can see just how common two apps are on the backend by comparing what triggers and actions are available for them on Zapier. For instance, let’s take a look at what we can do with Hubspot and Copper on Zapier. Both apps are CRMs that let users track projects, deals, and customers (among other features). 

When we use Hubspot or Copper as the triggering app, we can see a lot of similar options: New company, new product, new contact/new person, etc. The different terminology used by the two programs muddies the waters a little bit, but you can still see that you’re able to work with largely the same concepts for both.

If we compare Google Drive and Dropbox, we once again see some very similar options for triggers. In this case, there are a couple more options for Drive, but it’s essentially offering the same functionality. With both apps, you can trigger automations based on uploading new files. 

And when we check the available actions for both, we get two nearly identical lists.

So whether you prefer Drive or Dropbox (or something else) for your file storage, we can automate it all the same. 

Switch Tools Seamlessly with Automated Workflows

What if you’ve started automating your workflows around one program, but you’ve decided you want to switch to something else?

Luckily, the tool-agnostic nature of automation platforms also makes it easy to switch software if you decide you need a change. 

If you’ve built your systems around Dropbox but find a better pricing model with Google Drive, XRay’s technicians can help you to make that change. Because they already understand the business goals of your workflows, it’s simple for them to modify each automation to use your new software instead. 

These sorts of updates are one of the many reasons why we operate on a membership model rather than on a per-project basis. Plans change, goals change, and tools change. By offering long-term memberships, we make sure that our members’ existing automations can adapt and keep up with their shifting priorities, even as we’re building new ones. 

Automation Lets You Focus on Business Objectives

When you’re approaching workflow automation, your top priority as an entrepreneur, executive or manager should be to focus on your business goals, not to worry about which software will support automation. Low-code automation platforms are designed to accommodate most apps, and make it relatively simple to switch apps at any time - provided you have the right assistance. 

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

Formatter by Zapier is an indispensable tool for no-code and low-code automators. Whether you need to reformat your data, perform some calculations, or add some simple logic and flow control to your automations, Formatter can help you get it done quickly.

In this post, we’ll show you a few tips for using Utility functions from Formatter. Utilities are mostly focused on working with lists or list items; they’ll let you split up lists, put them together, pick a single item from a list, and more. They’ll also let you build a simple lookup table, giving your automations the ability to handle several different scenarios with a single step.

In the videos below, we’ll show you three key examples to help you get started with Formatter’s Utilities, but there are more available that we won’t be covering in this post. We encourage you to try them out for yourself; you can learn a lot about working with Zapier just through experimentation!

If you'd like to see Formatter's options for working with Text and Date/Time, check out this post.

You can also check out our rundown of Numbers functions in this blog post.

Pick from list

‍

The “Pick from list” function does exactly what its title suggests: it takes a list that you provide and chooses a single item from its contents. 

While configuring the step, you can choose whether you’d like to select the first item, the last one, or a random item. As of right now, there are no options for picking the second item, second to last, etc. 

At XRay, we’ve used Pick from List to generate a thematically appropriate password for a client’s automatically scheduled Zoom calls. They provided us with a list of words related to their company that met the Zoom meeting password requirements, and we set up their Zap to choose from that list. 

A simple step like Pick from List is not likely to revolutionize the way you build your automations, but it can be a very convenient tool in the right situations, and can be particularly helpful when you need to select a random item. 

Lookup Table

The “Lookup Table” option is a somewhat more robust feature that lets you create and access a table of key-value pairs within your Zap. 

In a key-value pair, a “key” is essentially a title that is associated with a piece of data (the “value”). You can easily find and access a value just by searching for its corresponding key. This can be very useful if you want to input a small piece of data to find and use a much longer output. 

For instance, in the example you’ll see in our video above, we enter a paragraph of templated text into an email by simply using a keyword in our Airtable form.

Filling out the form triggers the automation, and the automation uses the contents of the “Project type” field to search for a key-value pair in the lookup table. So by just entering “UX/UI Design” into the form, the automation can find the associated paragraph about UX/UI Design and enter it into our templated email in the next step. If the key word had been “App Development”, the automation would have provided the relevant text for Development instead. 

You could also create a lookup field in Airtable with linked records, but using a lookup table directly in Zapier can be a great alternative if you don’t use Airtable, or if you just want a simple lookup with only one value for each key. 

Text to line items

The Utilities portion of Formatter has a few different ways for working with line items and lists, such as the “Text to line items” function.

When you use Text to Line Items, you can separate a single piece of text into individual line items. Just enter the text you want to split, and make sure that it’s consistently separated with commas, spaces, semi-colons, or another symbol.

Formatter will then return a series of line items for each segment of your list. For example, “Blue, Red, Yellow” would become:

• Blue

• Red 

• Yellow

Like “Pick from List”, Text to Line Items isn’t a groundbreaking feature in formatter, but it can be quite useful. In subsequent steps, it can be much easier to work with distinct line items rather than having to include a full list every time you want to reference part of its data. 

Formatter also includes a function to go in the other direction and convert a series of line items into a single list. 

Build better Zaps with Formatter Utilities

Formatter’s Utilities menu gives automators several different ways to refine their Zaps with lookup tables, line item functions, and the ability to pick an item from a list. Formatter steps like these can help you to make Zaps with more accurate outputs and build automations that handle a wider range of situations.

If you’d like to learn more about using Zapier and other low-code automation tools, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Automation has long been a divisive subject, and the divide has only deepened as technology has made automation more accessible to entrepreneurs and small businesses. At XRay, we believe that the goal of automation should not be to eliminate human jobs, but rather to enable people to perform the best work they can. In our last several posts, we’ve discussed how anyone can start integrating automations into their business to reduce the amount of robotic work bogging them down. In this post, we want to look at the endgame of automated work, and show you how building the right automated infrastructure can lead to more effective and fulfilling work for everyone in your team.

Build an automated infrastructure

For automated work to become an effective component of your overall workflows, you need to build a comprehensive automated infrastructure. In technical terms, automated infrastructure consists of an operational database linked with a suite of SaaS tools and precisely documented business processes. Our documentation post explores the ins and outs of databases in greater detail, but essentially, your operational database should document each of your automations, the tools they use, and the business processes they contribute to. Your documentation should make it easy for anyone at your company to understand how all of your automations work in concert to complete robotic work and better enable your team members to get their jobs done.

While you could potentially create an operational database with any suitable software you prefer, we’ve found that Airtable is the best choice. One of the key features that makes Airtable particularly well-suited to the task is its column IDs. Rather than using letters like other spreadsheet software, Airtable uses unique IDs. This lets you add or rearrange columns without needing to remap all of your automations, which you would often have to do if you added a new column in software like Google Sheets. Your business will always be evolving, and your automated infrastructure needs to have the ability to evolve along with it. Adding or deleting columns in G-Sheets or other apps just creates unnecessary headaches.

Moving beyond the nuts and bolts of setting it up, the goal of automated infrastructure is to weave your automations seamlessly into your business and your team’s daily activity. Establishing an automated infrastructure at your company is about more than just building a whole bunch of automations; it’s about understanding your processes in intricate detail, and knowing which ones can and should be handled by robots. It’s about identifying a consistent order of operations that fulfill your business processes, and using automated tools to enhance and facilitate those operations wherever possible. It’s about creating a documented, transparent, and evolving system that enables the people who interact with it. 

Even in automation, people always come first

Automated work can only be successful if the humans on the other end of the automated work are aware of and enabled by the work that was just automated. No matter what your automation does, it doesn't matter if your team has no clue where things are or what happens next. If your project manager doesn’t know about the automatically generated database of client info that you’ve set up, they’ll still have to go digging for that data whenever they need it. To avoid situations like this, make sure your automations are structured to give your team context and easy access to any content created by the automations. You can use an “auto_updates” channel in Slack (or whichever messaging platform you prefer) to give your team regular updates on what your automation infrastructure is doing, or send DMs to the specific team members who need to follow up on the automated work.

It’s also important to include the relevant team members from the moment you start planning and building your automations. When you’re considering automating a task, remember that the people who currently perform that task will have a vital perspective based on their firsthand experience. There may be frequent roadblocks they encounter that the automation will need to account for, or extra steps they’ve added to make the process more effective. Give them a chance to share their views and explain what they would like to see from the automation. Otherwise, you could end up wasting a lot of time and resources building an automation that won’t even be useful for your team. 

Create seamless transitions between people and their robot helpers 

Another way you can fully integrate automated work into your business is by creating helpful on-ramps and off-ramps. In the XRay method, on-ramps are the actions a human needs to perform to begin an automation. In many cases, on-ramps take the form of a simple form or survey that prompts your team to provide the necessary information. When one of your team members fills out a survey to trigger an automation, they know that the automation has started and they can let the robots handle the next stages of the task.

Just as real-world on-ramps get you on the highway where you no longer need to worry about the tedium of stop signs and red lights, automation on-ramps are the transition point between human work and robotic work. To make that transition as smooth as possible, you should make sure that the forms you use to trigger automations are easy to use and understand. It’s often a good idea to include context about why each piece of information is needed, so that your team understands the purpose of all the data they’re grabbing. You may also want to create a swim lane diagram for your automated workflows that will illustrate exactly where human work ends and automated work begins, so your team has an even clearer picture of where the on-ramps are.

As you might assume, off-ramps are the opposite of on-ramps. When the automation has performed all of its steps and produced the desired data, documents, etc., it should alert the relevant team members that its job is complete, and hand off the new information in a neat package. Creating an activity log and automation updates channel will help keep your team apprised of all your automated activity, but it can also be beneficial to send direct messages to relevant team members when an automation is complete, or create an assignment for them in your task management. You can build those alerts into your automations whenever an automation will require an immediate follow-up, or is particularly important for just one or two of your team members. When you’re building your off-ramps, remember that any data that your team members need to interact with should be human-readable. Your automations can work easily with a series of numbers without much context, but your humans can’t. Spending a little extra time on formatting and labelling the output of your automation can save your employees and colleagues a lot of time and hassle. 

Ultimately, the purpose of building on-ramps and off-ramps is to create seamless transitions between automated work and human work. People shouldn’t have to put in extensive effort and dramatically change the way they do things to fit the automations; the autos should meet them where they are and just make things easier.

Automated work enhances human work

At XRay, we don’t see automation as a replacement for human jobs. We see automation as a way to make humans more productive, and to let them focus more on the work that they’re uniquely suited to. There are a lot of things that software can just do better than people, and that people would rather not have to do anyway. Sending invoices, scheduling and logging meetings, basic reports and records - these are the kind of tasks that can be automated so that they’re not cluttering up your daily to-do list. More often than not, a well-designed automation can perform these tasks faster, more consistently, and with fewer errors. When you build an automated infrastructure and fully integrate automated work into your business, you’ll create time for your team to focus on what they’re good at and what they find fulfilling. When your team spends less time logging and recording data, they’ll have more time to analyze and interpret that data. When your team spends less time compiling and searching for client records, they’ll have more time to actually work with your clients and address their needs.

The goal of automated work is not to supplant people from your organization, but to give them the tools they need to perform better and more valuable work.

Automated Work in Action

The conversation around automation is often dominated by discussion of time saving. While it’s certainly true that automation can save time for your company, that’s not the whole picture. 

Beyond saving and reallocating time, automation ensures more consistent processes and results, lets you gather pertinent data on all of your workflows, and creates a more fulfilling workplace for your team. 

Time Saved is Also Time Reallocated

Of course, properly designed and implemented automations do save you time and money. Each time an automation runs, it performs a process faster than you or your team could have done it manually. Each run adds up to time saved, and time saved is money saved. 

However, looking at automation strictly through the lens of time saved might make it seem like a relatively fruitless endeavor. This is because time savings are only the beginning of the value created by automation. 

For instance, a closely related but easily overlooked benefit of automation is time reallocation. After all, the time you saved isn’t just a cost reduction on the balance sheet; once you’ve set up an automation to handle one of your robotic tasks, you can repurpose that time into something more valuable, more worthwhile, or more mindful. 

The simple metric of saving 10-15 minutes a day might not seem like much, but those extra 15 minutes of focused, productive work can be invaluable. Spending another 15 minutes in a flow state while doing something creative can produce much better results than having to interrupt yourself early to perform a distracting robotic task.

Alternatively, being able to take a 15 minute break to recharge instead of jumping back and forth between different menial tasks can make your entire day more productive and relaxing.

Whatever you choose to do with the time you saved, just remember that automation can deliver both sides of the coin: less time working on robotic tasks, and more time spent on mindful work.

Automation Creates Consistent, Reliable Processes

Errors are an inevitable part of any manual process. No matter how diligent, skilled, and experienced your team is, they’re going to make mistakes from time to time. As human beings, we just can’t help making the occasional typo, or forgetting to send an email, or hitting “reply all” instead of “reply” every now and again. 

However, when you automate a process, you ensure that it’s performed exactly the same way every time. The automation will (almost) never forget to run a step, make typos, or mess up a calculation. 

Even if you’re not measuring your error rate or time spent fixing mistakes now, you’ll still notice the improved consistency that comes with automating your workflows. When you’ve automated much of the robotic work at your organization, you’ll experience fewer issues with clients, less confusion among your team, and less time wasted on redundant work. 

Of course, this reliability is dependent on the automation being set up correctly in the first place, which is why we test our automation prototypes thoroughly before handing them off to our clients.

We also would never claim that automations are perfect. From time to time, your automations will encounter errors. However, many of these errors will simply be caused by the apps you’re automating experiencing downtime. If Slack’s servers are down, the app will be inaccessible whether you’re using it for manual or automated work.

In other cases, you’ll encounter automation errors when an update to one of the programs involved changes the way data is stored or processed, requiring us to fix the automation before it can run properly again. While any error is frustrating, errors in automated workflows will be caught quickly by our error-handling systems, so you’ll experience very little downtime. On the other hand, manual errors often go unnoticed for days or weeks, leaving you with a mountain of work to fix.

Automating Workflows Lets You Gather Data on Everything You Do 

Automating some or all of a process is one of the most effective ways to start tracking key metrics related to that process. 

At XRay, each automated workflow is incorporated into a larger automated infrastructure. Every time an automated action runs, it creates a record of itself in a centralized activity log. There, you’ll be able to see how often each automation runs, the date and time for each individual run, and any documents or assets produced.

So if you automate the process of uploading a sales report to Google Drive, or sending invoices through Quickbooks, you’ll now automatically gather data on how many reports your team is filing - or how many invoices they send each week and how quickly those invoices are paid.

Whatever you want to track can be recorded in the activity log, so you’ll be able to see how your processes have become more consistent and efficient, and identify areas that still need further refinement. 

Automation Leads to More Fulfilling Work

Most knowledge workers don’t want to spend their time every day on the kind of mindless work that can be automated. Instead, they would rather focus on challenging, fulfilling work that actually makes use of their unique talents. 

Automation lets your team move their time away from mind-numbing copy-and-paste tasks, and refocus their efforts into work that pushes them to be creative, analytic, strategic, or thoughtful. 

Mindful work like that is the kind of work that’s most satisfying for people to perform, and is the kind of work that provides the most value to you as their employer. Automating robotic tasks lets each of your team members focus as much of their time as possible on the work they’re uniquely suited to, rather than spending their time getting ready to work or reporting on what they’ve done. 

In the long run, employees who can spend their time on work they enjoy are going to be more likely to stick with your company, and increased retention will prevent the cost and challenges of recruiting new talent. 

Save Time, Improve Reliability, and Promote a Better Workplace Experience

It’s easy to think of the value automation as a simple equation of time and money saved whenever the automation runs, but automation offers much more value than that. 

Automation lets you reallocate time, produce a more consistent and accurate output, gather data on your workflows, and raise employee satisfaction. 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.

Zapier is a useful tool all on its own, but connecting it with an Airtable Database will give you more control over how and when your automations run. In this post, we’ll show you a few tips for getting started with using Airtable as an Operational Database for your Zaps, and demonstrate how you can use Airtable views to trigger automations based on any conditions that you want. 

Why We Use Airtable

At XRay, we typically aim to be as software-agnostic as possible, as automation platforms can usually work well with any tool that you prefer. However, when it comes to creating an Operational Database (ODB) for your automations, we strongly recommend using Airtable over any other spreadsheet or database software. 

While there are many reasons for this, one of the most immediate advantages that Airtable offers is its unique column IDs. When you make a table in Airtable, the software assigns each column a unique and permanent ID. Even if you rename or rearrange your columns, the IDs remain intact. 

Conversely, in software like Excel or Google Sheets, columns are only identified by their name - typically, “A, B, C”, etc.

This might seem like a minor technical detail, but it’s vitally important when you start building automations that connect to your database. 

Zapier locates G Sheets columns based on their letter name, so if you rearrange the columns in your spreadsheet after setting up a Zap, that automation will likely break until you update it with the new column assignments.

For Airtable bases, Zapier looks up information based on the Column ID, so you can freely update your database without having to worry about breaking your automations. 

Another key feature that Airtable offers is the ability to make “views”, which is the main focus of this post.

Make Precise, Customizable Zap Triggers with Airtable Views

In many cases, you’ll only want your Zap to fire off under specific circumstances. Airtable’s “view” feature makes it easy to sort and filter your data to control when your Zaps trigger.

When you create a view in Airtable, you can filter your data however you want without needing to alter or duplicate the data itself. Just make a new view using the “Create a view” options in the bottom left of the screen. 

You can use filters to determine which records from the original table will appear in this view. You can set virtually any criteria that you want while creating your view. 

For instance, let’s imagine that we want to send automated emails to Vice Presidents of Accounting explaining how our company’s services can help their accounting department. In this view below, we’re only including records where the entry for the “job_title” field is “VP accounting”.

Just click on the “Filter” button to add your own filters. 

To start a Zapier automation whenever a new record appears in our “VP of Accounting” view, we just choose Airtable for our trigger application, and select “New Record in View” as our trigger event.

Then, we select our base, table, and view from the menu (you may need to refresh the fields if you just created the view). 

Now, whenever we have a new VP of Accounting show up in our database, we can trigger an automation that will only apply to them. If we ever want to change our criteria for who receives this email, we just need to adjust the parameters on our view’s filter. We won’t even need to update the Zap itself!

Additionally, by controlling when your Zaps run (or don’t run) with Airtable views, you can save your limited Zapier tasks instead of wasting them on Zaps that will stop once they reach your filter step. 

Go Further With Automations

This post only scratches the surface of what Airtable views can do for your Zaps and other automations. If you’d like to learn more and see additional examples, check out our video about Airtable views on YouTube.

If you’d like to learn more about how automations can reshape your company and eliminate robotic work, take a look at our series on the XRay Method.

You can also check out Airtable’s support docs for more info, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions about improving your workflows.

If you’ve explored the no-code and low-code automation space, you’re probably already familiar with programs like Zapier that let you connect your apps together to build automations. 

While Zapier is a great place to get started, and an indispensable tool for automators of any skill level, Make will give you access to more advanced techniques.

Make (formerly known as Integromat) is similar to Zapier, but offers a wider range of functions for each of the apps it supports. Conversely, Make doesn’t support as many programs as Zapier, and its more advanced technical features make it a little more difficult to learn. 

In this post, we’ll walk you through a couple of simple Make automations to help you get started with the platform and show you how it works. The first automation will create an archive of every message sent in a specific Slack channel, while the second will delete messages from that archive once they’re over 1 month old. 

Creating an Automated Slack Message Archive

1. Create a database in Airtable

First, create a database in Airtable where you’ll store your archive. You can also use Google Sheets if you’d like, but you’ll need to modify some of the steps in the tutorial.

‍

2. Create a new Make Scenario

Create a new “scenario” in Make, and give it a descriptive name. You may also want to use folders to keep your automations organized. 

3. Add a new Slack module

Unlike Zapier, Make doesn’t fully separate automated steps in “Triggers” and “Actions”. Instead, you’ll have to make a new module and find the right trigger from the list: “Watch Public Channel Messages [Acid]”.

‍

The “ACID” tag means that this is an action that conforms to ACID criteria for database transactions. In Integromat, this effectively means that this module will rollback any actions it performed if it encounters an error. It will either run successfully, or it won't run at all.

You don't worry too much about the ACID tag when you're getting started with Integromat, but it's a good thing to keep in mind as you're building your scenarios.

Sign in to your Slack account, and choose the channel you want Make to watch for new messages.

4. Test your trigger module and review the data

To test your trigger, right click on it and select “Choose where to start” >”choose manually”. Pick a message from the list, and then click on the “Run once” button. You’ll want to do this every time you need to test your scenario.

‍

By choosing your starting point manually every time, you’ll ensure that you’re using the right test data. 

Check the information that Make pulls in from Slack. You should see things like the user ID of the sender, the message content, the date it was sent, and more.

5. New Slack module: Get a User

What you won’t see in the module’s data is the user’s name. If you’d like to attach a name to the message rather than just a string of random characters, you’ll need to add another step to look up the username based on the retrieved ID. 

Add a new Slack module, and select “Get a User”. For the ID, enter the “ID” data pulled in by the first module. 

‍

Test the scenario again by right-clicking on the first module and selecting “choose where to start manually”, then clicking on “run once”. 

Click on the number by the second module to see the data it retrieved, and you should see the user’s name among several other pieces of info. 

6. New Airtable module: Create a record

Create a new module and choose Airtable. Select “Create a record”, sign in to your Airtable account, and choose the base and table that you want to use for this automation. 

Populate it with the information you’ve gathered from the previous modules, like the message content, its send date, the user who sent it, etc.

‍

While Zapier requires additional steps to format text and dates, Make allows for easy in-line formatting. Just click on the “A” icon to bring up text formatting functions, or the calendar icon for date formatting. 

Once you’ve finished setting up the module, test the scenario again using the same procedure we’ve outlined before. 

Check Airtable, and you should see new messages there.

Deleting old messages from the archive

Our second automation will delete messages from our Airtable archive once they’re a month old. 

Deleting records is one of the most basic functions that sets Make apart from Zapier. While Make supports deletion in most of its modules, Zapier doesn’t support it in any of their integrations as a rule.

You need to be careful when adding a step to delete records in your automations, but it can be very useful if you don’t want old data hanging around and piling up forever. 

1. Make a new Airtable view

In your Airtable base, add a new view to your table called “Old messages”. Add a filter so that the view will only include records where ‘Send date’ is on or before one month ago. 

Our next Make scenario will watch this view for new records. If you don’t have any old records to test with, just change the date on an existing record to make it fit the criteria.

‍

You’ll also need to add a “Last modified” column to this table so that Airtable can tell when each record was added or updated.

‍

2. Create a new Make scenario

Make a new scenario, and choose Airtable for your first module. Select “Watch Records [Acid]”, and pick your base and table. Use your “last modified” column as the trigger field and choose the “Old messages” view. 

‍

Test the module, and confirm that the right message(s) have been retrieved.

3. New Airtable module: Delete Record

Add a new Airtable module to your scenario and choose “Delete Record”. Choose your base and table, and enter the record ID that Make retrieved in the first module. 

‍

Test your scenario again, and then check Airtable to confirm that your old records have been deleted. 

Picking the right tool for the job

When you’re comparing software like Make and Zapier, there’s no one, universal right answer for which software is better. Ultimately, each tool will be better suited to certain situations. If you need more extensive and precise control, Make will likely be the better choice, but it will require some more experience to use. If you need to support a huge range of software, Zapier will likely be the ideal option, but won’t offer as many automated actions.

At XRay, our techs know how to use both of these platforms and more so that they can use the right tool for every job, and we encourage other automators to do the same. If you’d like to learn more about Make, Zapier, Unito, and other automation platforms, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Selling your small business can be a challenge, particularly when you’re a service-oriented company. When your company is built on process rather than product, it can be hard to find a way to sell the ideas and procedures that have made your business a success.

If you’re the owner or founder of an SMB and you’re looking to sell your company, you should consider how automation can transform your processes into a more tangible asset and make your business more appealing to potential buyers. 

In this post, we’ll show you how automated workflows and an accompanying Process Playbook can become a valuable tool for anyone seeking to sell their company.

What Buyers Want to See in a Company

While there are many different potential motivations that can drive acquisition, let’s focus on buyers who intend to keep running the company that they acquire. 

Ultimately, the new owner will want to replicate the success that you’ve had while running the company. They’ll want to move in some of their own staff and pick up right where you left off with your customers or clients, selling the same things and bringing in the same revenue. 

How can you convince a prospective buyer that they’ll have everything they need after the ownership transition? How can you show them that you have the formula to success laid out and ready for them to follow? 

One way to create a compelling and practical “business bible” is through workflow automation.

Workflow Automation

Workflow Automation is a method of identifying the robotic tasks in your company’s day-to-day work and partially or fully automating them. 

At XRay, we’ve found that the most common robotic tasks in a modern office typically consist of simply moving data from one piece of software to another: filling in a report in one app with stats from another, logging a recent project update, or setting the status on a lead after a sales call. 

Tasks that essentially amount to copying and pasting data are not worth your time or your team’s, and are the first tasks that we automate with our members. Automating those tasks creates more time and better prepares you for the work that really is worthy of your attention.

When your new leads are mostly handled through automated, templated emails, that gives your sales team more time to interact with the fringe cases, and more time to prepare for the particularly important details. 

Automations are a great asset for your business to have when you’re hoping for a liquidity event, as the new owner can assume control of the automations just as they would with a proprietary app or website.

But to really make the case for continuity (and to get the most out of your automations while you’re still in charge), you’ll want to have each automation documented in a Process Playbook. 

The Process Playbook: a Guide to Repeatable Success 

A Process Playbook is a set of documentation that explains how to accurately and consistently execute any process that you regularly conduct at your business.

Whenever we build an automation for our members or for our internal use, we create another page in the Process Playbook to reflect it. Each page explains what the automation is for, how to use it, where to find any relevant resources, and what manual steps need to take place before or after the automation happens.

As we build more automations for a member, their Playbook essentially becomes a thorough user’s manual on how to operate their business. A document like that is extremely useful whenever you’re hiring new team members, and can be a great asset to show to any potential buyers.

If you think of your business and any staff who will stay on after the transition as the ingredients for success at your organization, then the Process Playbook is the recipe on how to put it all together. 

Showing a prospective buyer just a few select pages from your Playbook will go a long way towards reassuring them that they’ll be able to replicate your actions even when you’re no longer the one steering the ship. It simplifies each process into an easily understood set of actions and information that they can put into practice and refine on their own as they get some experience.

Automating to Support Your Exit Strategy

Selling a company is never an easy thing. Finding a buyer, agreeing on terms, and handing off a business that you’ve devoted so much hard work to is a challenge for any entrepreneur.

Automating your workflows when you’re looking to sell your company might seem counterintuitive, but with the right documentation, it’s actually a great way to package your processes as a valuable asset for prospective buyers.

If you want to know more about how automation can help SMBs at any stage in their lifecycle, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Something that new or prospective members often wonder about is how we transfer your automations over to you once they’re complete and ready to go live.

Our approach to building automations makes handoff a quick and seamless process, and our documentation ensures that you and your team will know everything required to understand and operate your automations. 

In this post, we’ll explain our handoff process and how we document all of your automations to make them easy to use. 

Building On Your Accounts for a Seamless Handoff

As we covered in our previous post about XRay memberships, we build automations for our members on their own accounts. 

Using secure password management software like Lastpass, we’ll ask you to send us credentials to sign into your automation platform accounts like Zapier or Integromat, along with any other software involved in your automations. 

Our techs will then create all of your automations in those accounts, meaning that you’ll have access to your automations as soon as we’ve built them. As such, there’s no need for us to transfer any files in order for you to start using your automated workflows; they’ll be immediately accessible through your existing logins. 

Instead, the majority of our “handoff” process is focused on providing you with the documentation your team needs to use the automations effectively. 

Robust Documentation Lets You Integrate Automations into Your Business Processes

For each automation that we build, we provide two kinds of documentation: the Process Playbook, and technical documentation. 

Process Playbook

The Process Playbook describes clearly and concisely what each automation does, and what your team needs to do to use it. This will also include links to any relevant resources that you might need to complete the workflow.

We like to say that this documentation keeps the humans informed about what the robots are doing. This is especially true in certain cases where the automation will run without any manual interaction at all. 

In any case, knowing how to use your new automated workflows is critical to ensuring that your team actually uses the automations and takes advantage of them. 

Technical Documentation

While our Process Playbook docs are written by our technicians to summarize and explain each automation, our technical documentation consists of automatically collected metadata stored in an Activity Log.

You can check your Activity Log at any time to see big-picture metrics like how many times a given automation has run or an estimate of the total time saved, or dig in for more granular details pertaining to each individual instance of the automation. Every time an automation runs, you’ll see a detailed record in the Activity Log noting the date and time that it ran, links to any assets the automation created, and other key metadata. 

Combined with the Process Playbook, our technical documentation makes it easy to know what your automations are doing at any time.

Find Everything You Need in the Workflow Dash

To make it easy to find and access your automation documentation, we bundle everything into the Workflow Dash.

The Workflow Dash is an app that we’ve developed at XRay.Tech that lets you and your team save links and resources as easily accessible pins on a shared dashboard. 

The app is free for our members, and we’ll save all of your documentation and relevant links as Pins in your Workflow Dash. Everything you’ll need to use your automations or train new team members will be just a click away. 

The Workflow Dash is just one of the tools that we’re developing internally to help build and manage automations for our members. As new tools become ready for use, we’ll continue to share them 

Keep Everything We Build for Your Company

While we always strive to establish successful, long-term memberships, we understand that your business needs and goals may change over time. If you do choose to end your membership, we’ll be sure to transfer any files you need to keep using your automations. 

As we mentioned previously, there normally won’t be many files to transfer as we build your automation on your own accounts. Typically, we would just need to send you an Airtable base, as we normally use our own Airtable account for our members for the sake of gathering certain metrics.

Otherwise, everything will already be in your possession on your own accounts, so in the event that we do part ways, you’ll have no problem continuing to use your automations. 

Easy Handoff and Delivery

We hope this post has been helpful for clarifying our handoff and delivery processes. Because we work within our members’ systems, we don’t need to transfer many files back and forth. Instead, we focus on organizing and documenting your automations to make them super easy to use. 

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

There are only so many hours in the day, and there seems to be a mountain of things to do. Whether you're in corporate America or whiteknuckling your boot straps at a startup, you know how this feels. The neverending to-do list and ever-growing pile of repetitive tasks can feel overwhelming and frustrating. Sometimes, you might work all day but feel like you’ve accomplished nothing because you were on back-to-back Zoom calls all day.

However, stepping back and breaking your day-to-day work down into its component parts can help to make the whole process much more effective and fulfilling. At XRay, we believe that there are only 3 things that people do at work. (1) We get ready to do work, curating as much information as we need in order to accomplish the task at hand. (2) We actually perform the work, using our CAST Skills to their highest and best ability to create value out of raw inputs. (3) We update our team on the work we just did, making sure that everyone knows the latest progress towards our collective goal.

Understanding the three phases of work and how they can support or detract from each other will go a long way to making your work more productive and enjoyable. 

Identify what you need to be ready to work

The vast majority of the time, your day won’t be neatly divided into three distinct stages of preparing to work, doing your work, and updating your team about your work. Rather than preparing for an hour, working for 6 hours, and sending out updates for an hour, it’s more likely that you’ll repeat all of the phases several times throughout the day for separate projects and assignments. You’ll gather information for Client A’s project in the morning, then log an update on your progress for Client B immediately after. Once you’re done with lunch, it’s time for a team meeting to prepare for an internal project, leaving you some time to finally get some work done on your assignment for Client C. In the hectic flurry of to-dos, it can often be hard to identify where preparation ends and the work itself begins. 

One of the first steps toward making your work more fulfilling is to determine exactly what “preparing for work” means for you. Start with a single process that you have to perform regularly, and make a list of all of the information you need to have in place before you can start working on it. For example, let’s say you need to create a personalized presentation for each new lead that your sales team pursues. For each presentation, you know you’ll need the company’s name, the name of your point of contact at the company, a description of their problem, the services you’ll offer, and your company’s planned start date. 

Action Steps

You can start by just making a checklist to ensure that you seek out all of this information, but much of this information could be gathered more effectively with a simple survey that one of your sales reps would fill out. You could set up an automation to store and format the responses, so that you and anyone who needs the information can access it at any time. 

Automating your preparation cuts down on the back-and-forth messages needed to gather information manually, and ultimately makes for a more transparent and accessible process. 

Peak performance is the goal

The purpose of optimizing and automating your robotic tasks isn’t just to make those tasks themselves run more effectively, but to give you more focus when performing CAST tasks. When preparation, performing, and updates are blended into one tangled, unexamined process, work quality and personal satisfaction are bound to suffer. If you missed a crucial piece of information during your preparation, you could get blocked on the process in question for hours while you wait for a response. If your status updates aren’t getting to the right people at the right time, your coworkers or clients could end up with misaligned expectations.

When you optimize your preparation and updates to use up less time and reduce distractions, you also create better conditions to focus on your mindful work. When you don’t have to worry about simply fetching information or sending it along to someone else, you can focus on the more important and fulfilling aspects of your work. Instead of having to go looking for data or bugging your coworkers for their updates (or getting bugged with theirs), you can concentrate on your work knowing that the data you need is readily available and that any updates can occur as scheduled. When you can concentrate your attention entirely on the task at hand without having to pause constantly, you can often experience a flow state, where your total focus leads to a deeply fulfilling and almost effortless productivity. With a structured and automated preparation and updating phases, you can devote your full efforts to the creativity, analysis, strategy, or thoughtfulness that your job requires.

Don't let updates eat up your day

Much like preparing to do work, updating your team and clients on the work that you’ve done is a major contributor to your robotic workload. While you sometimes have to communicate some nuance or context, you’re often simply giving a status update on your progress. To avoid spending so much time on simply telling others what you’ve done, start by building up a system of asynchronous communication. With 80% of full-time workers expecting to work remotely at least three days a week after the COVID-19 pandemic, our global economy is relying more on remote work every day.  In an environment where we’re rarely face-to-face with our coworkers and spontaneous water cooler chats aren’t possible, asynchronous communication is key to letting each individual within a team operate at their best. 

Many workplaces default to ad hoc updates, where team members and managers will sporadically prod their colleagues for the current status of a project or report. Answering your coworkers’ requests and sending out your own can be both a critical time sink and an irritating distraction for everyone involved. Instead of asking for updates as the need arises, you can adapt your current processes to suit asynchronous communication by building in checkpoints in advance. 

Action Steps

Map out one of your most common processes step by step and mark the major milestones. The nature of the milestone can vary a lot from task to task, but you generally want to highlight the steps in the process where your work can now enable someone else to take action. As you list the milestone, identify the people who need to be notified once it’s complete. While you could still notify them manually at first, setting up a notification schedule like this will put you well on your way to creating an automated system to notify your colleagues or clients about your day-to-day or week-to-week progress. 

Whether you choose to automate the processes or not, the goal is to avoid being reactive whenever possible. Unplanned interruptions throughout your day can cut into your time and make it much harder to stay focused, as even a seemingly brief distraction can cause workers to spend over 20 minutes finding their focus again. By creating scheduled and automated status updates, you can keep people informed of your progress without having to allocate so much of your own time to it. 

Improving your work days 1% at a time

The cycle of preparation, performance, and updates defines our day-to-day work. Trying to do all three at once throughout your entire day will only lead to worse results, higher stress, and a reactive work culture.  By separating your tasks into their component phases, you can foster a more proactive culture that allows everyone to focus without distractions and start removing robotic work through automations. Instead of your team members having to constantly ping each other on Slack to check the status of each project, they can simply refer to the scheduled updates. Instead of having to hunt down important data while in the middle of drafting a document, your team can avoid interruptions by identifying and gathering all of the necessary data beforehand. Ultimately, the goal is to adjust your workflows to let the humans in your team accomplish more without having to expend additional effort. You can make each week 1% more efficient, effective and fulfilling for your team by organizing their workflows and enhancing them with automation.

‍

The way we do our jobs is continuously changing. Every day, we find and use new tools, copy and paste information all over the internet, and try our best to teach the humans around us what we just did. We figure out what we should be doing through practice, intuition, and critical thinking, but we often lack the resources and clarity needed to document our processes so that they can be successfully transferred to another person or an automation. This blog series introduces the XRay method, which is an approach to defining the components of your business so that you can create efficient, repeatable processes and start automating work that's eating up your team's time. It's a formula to help create more mindful time for humans to focus on the things that matter, rather than the things that are necessary to continue working.

It's simple.

Humans should do human work, and robots should do robotic work.

This is not another SaaS tool.

The XRay method is a way to leverage the tools you already use in a smarter, intentional, and more contextual way to better achieve your business goals.

Let's walk through how you can start identifying and automating your company's robotic tasks.  In this article, we'll take a quick look at each of the main segments of the XRay method, while our next articles in this series will take a deeper dive into each topic. If you follow along with the action steps outlined in this post, you'll get a quick and simple version of what the XRay method can accomplish. If you'd like to see more, read the rest of our posts and reach out to us with any questions you might have.

Day-to-day Operations

Every day, there are four components to the work that you and your people engage in. Those four components are Tools (Software), Business Processes, Robotic Work, and Human Jobs.

Software Tools

First, let's talk about Tools. You may use a variety of tools that help your team with everything from time tracking, communication and performance to analytics and finance. These are the pieces of software that let us do our job. Things like G Suite, Slack, Calendar and Mailchimp are all tools that make one little facet of our day-to-day jobs a little easier.

Step 1: List your tools

Catalog all of the tools that you and your team use on a day-to-day basis by generating a list of all the software that you use (spoiler alert, it's probably a long list!).

Don't worry, you will almost definitely forget a tool or two the first time you try to make this list. You can always revise it later if needed.

We recommend saving this list as a database in Airtable and updating it whenever you start using a new tool or stop using an old one. By keeping track of all of the software you use, you can avoid the redundancy of having multiple apps that all do the same thing, and you can start building a picture of where your business-critical data lives.

Business Processes

Business Processes are the overarching steps needed to perform a process. For example, an Employee Onboarding process will have a list of tasks for the company to do, and another list of tasks for the new employee to do.

The list might include items like watch the introduction video, set up your email, share your calendar, make accounts for company software, etc.

All business processes consist of a mix of Robotic Work and Human Jobs. Let's take a look at the difference between these two task types next.

Step 2: List some of your high-level business processes

These could be things like posting to social media, employee or client onboarding, KPI Tracking, etc. If you can, then try to write bullet points about what each step is.

Robotic Work

These are things like copying and pasting information, moving files to different directories, uploading files, or sending a confirmation message once another task is finished.

They take little to no intellectual effort, but are essential for your team to perform their work. Robotic Work is typically a list of tasks that are required to create the right environment needed to perform Human Jobs.

Step 3: Identify which steps in the high level business processes are Robotic.

Some examples of robotic work include:

‍

• Opening email attachments (e.g., new email matching search)
• Logging into web apps (e.g., a tool from the example tool kit)
• Moving files and folders in Drive
• Reading and writing to databases like Airtable or Sheets
• Scraping data from web and docs
• Connecting to APIs
• Making calculations
• Extracting structured data
• Collecting social media analytics
• Following if/then rules

‍

We call robotic work "robotic" because it's the kind of work that can be performed by robots, which is our term for any automation that performs a task. A "robot" could be an automation in Zapier that saves every link you post in Slack to an Airtable Database, or a script that scrapes data from webpages for research.

As this survey from Deloitte shows, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is growing rapidly and helping companies to improve the quality and consistency of their output on top of saving time. By identifying the tasks that could be performed by robots, you'll already be one step closer to automating those tasks.

Human Jobs

Human Jobs are the parts of a business process that involve mindful tasks, as opposed to robotic tasks. These mindful tasks need to be completed and executed well to ensure that the overall business process is done correctly. Mindful tasks are activities that require creative, analytic, strategic, and thoughtful work. These tasks require your focus and attention in order to be complete. Additionally, they are typically the most fulfilling areas of your work. You're happier when you have time to do more mindful tasks and spend less time on robotic work.

Step 4: Identify Mindful Tasks inside of each Business Process

Some examples of Mindful Tasks include:

• Making strategic decisions
• Building personal or professional relationships
• Collaborating on ideas
• Creating content (graphic, written, video, etc.)
• Interpreting data and trends
• Making moral and ethical decisions
• Granting final approvable on a deliverable

Ultimately, one of the main goals of implementing automation is to create more time and focus for your mindful tasks. Interrupting your complex mindful tasks with a flurry of robotic tasks throughout the day breaks your concentration and requires to spend more time on all of your work, as this APA study on context switching shows.

Automation Infrastructure

In order to remove Robotic Work from your day to day, you'll need to set up some automation infrastructure. This will serve as the backbone of your automations and allow you to accumulate best practices, adopt your highest internal standards, and be as transparent as possible throughout your processes.

Documentation

Documentation consists of the flowcharts, checklists and how-tos that are essential for knowledge transfer as someone new begins to perform various Business Processes. There are two types of documentation that are massively helpful:

• Knowledge Base - apps like Notion.so for text documents, or Lucid.app for flowcharts

• Database - software like Airtable to create databases for your automations, resources, and more

As your documentation about processes get better, so will the information you're able to collect and re-use. That is why Knowledge Bases and Databases are so important. Your automations will constantly be pushing and pulling information from your databases, while you are able to keep your Knowledge Base up to date for all of the Mindful Tasks that you and your people will need to perform.

Some examples of Documentation:

• A flowchart that illustrates one of your business processes step-by-step
• Text documents or video walkthroughs that describe how to complete certain tasks
• A database of your company's key resources, people, tools, networks, and more
• Sample documents that serve as examples of finished deliverables

Step 5 - Document the Mindful Task Processes

‍
Asset Templates

Asset Templates get you 90% of the structure with 10% of the content. They let someone quickly open a template and immediately know what to do. There is a clear starting point (the template) and a clear end point (an example of what 'done' looks like — referenced in Documentation). Google Drive has an entire template library, check it out if you haven't yet.

Step 6 - Create Templates from your best Deliverables

• With Zapier, you can insert information directly into any GSuite document type. Just remove the client specific information and put your variable inside of curly braces.
• For example, at the tops of all my Google documents, I have my Synapse + {{clientName}} in the header. Give it a try on Zapier.
  

Automated Work

This is where all the magic happens. Leveraging a tool like Zapier.com (alternatives include Make.com, Workato, or native automations in Airtable), you're able to connect multiple tools together into a powerful If→ Then sequence. You could add logic like "if xyz is true, then do A; if not, then do B". It can get pretty sophisticated.

For example, at my software design studio Checkmate.Digital, we had a 35-Step onboarding process that was initiated by an internal, 10 question survey.

Surveys are one of the best methods to automate internal work.

With those 10 questions, we were able to accomplish 35 separate tasks, including:

• Create a Quickbooks Customer, send an invoice, input an estimate
• Create a slack channel & send template messages
• Create gDrive structure, copy & move template files
• Send a "welcome email"
• Schedule the next 5 meetings internally on the calendar

As a CEO, automating these robotic tasks let me know that all 35 steps were always completed quickly, correctly, and consistently.

Operational Clarity

No one is 100% efficiently performing work for 100% of the time they devote to their work. Of course, we, as humans, are not robots. But there is something to be said about emphasizing the clarity of priorities, directions, guides, and checklists. Strong documentation and asset templates create a clear hierarchy of tasks for the people performing the work, and while 100% performance might not be possible, these resources can help everyone to perform better. The result is a simple understanding of context as to why something needs to get done a particular way, and an understanding of purpose behind the individual task.

Note • Operational clarity keeps people from feeling lost, frustrated, and undervalued. The next time you want something done faster and at a higher quality, try starting with an asset template, and make a Loom video of yourself doing it the right way. You'd be amazed at the number of questions you can eliminate.

Passive Data Collection

Automated Work sequences remove the effort from data collection. These sequences can log an email being opened or a survey being completed the instant they happen. Over time, your sequences will accumulate a huge list of events that are happening inside the company. As a result, the status of projects, results, and efforts are captured without the dreaded "how's X going" interruption from upper management. This allows workers to focus on their work, and managers to focus on the results that they are given as a result of work being done. It's non-invasive, it's metadata, and it allows for greater transparency at every level of the organization. Automated work allows data collection without disturbing anyone's workflow.

Note • Next time you ask for an update on a project, think about whether that data point could have been passively collected without disturbing the worker!

Create Time for Better Work

Automating your Robotic Tasks wherever you can frees up more time to focus on your Human or Mindful Tasks, but that's only part of the value you get from automation. The automation process prompts you to put your business processes under a microscope. It requires you to clarify any ambiguity or uncertainty in your processes as you create stable, repeatable processes and comprehensive documentation. As you're presented with new challenges and opportunities in the future, you can mindfully assess and adapt your established processes as needed instead of relying on ad hoc solutions.

If you'd like to learn more about how you can start automating your business processes, just click on "Contact" to reach out to us.

‍

‍

‍

Keeping your databases in sync can be tricky when you have different teams using different software, but Unito makes it easy to keep everything up to date. In this video, we'll show you how to get started with syncing Google Sheets and Airtable with Unito. Read Unito's detailed Google Sheets setup guide here for more information.

As most in the automation space already know, Zapier is a great no-code automation tool for any skill level. It’s easy to get started with, but under the surface, it offers more robust features that advanced users can leverage to build complex automated workflows. 

In this post, we’ll share some tips and best practices that will help intermediate to advanced users to navigate some of Zapier’s more technical features, and we’ll give you some of XRay’s own strategies for managing an automated infrastructure.

When you put the concepts in this post into practice, you’ll be on your way to building automations that can effectively automate work for your entire department - or even your entire company. 

Filter Your Data for Flexible Zaps

Filters are an underused feature on Zapier that can give you much more control over your Zaps. To use a Filter, add a new action step in any of your Zaps and search for “Filter by Zapier”. 

The filter step will stop the Zap from continuing unless it meets certain criteria, which you can set under “Only continue if...:”.

For instance, if you’re setting up a Zap to handle your clients database, you can use a filtering step to only keep going if the client’s status is “Active”. You could use your first steps before the filter to update the client’s record with relevant Google Drive folders and links, and then send a kickoff email only to your active clients that pass the filter. 

As you’re building your filter step, Zapier will indicate whether or not your test data would have passed the filter. To get the most accurate results while building and testing, make sure to use at least two sets of data: one that should pass the filter, and one that should fail it. 

By using filters in your automations, you can cover multiple scenarios with a single Zap instead of making one for each situation, making your automations more flexible and efficient. 

Build an Activity Log to Track Automated Actions

As you start creating more automations, it becomes more important to stay aware of what they’re doing and the assets they’re creating. Automations running invisibly in the background can easily create problems as your goals and circumstances change.

Additionally, you’ll likely want to gather metrics on how much time your automations are saving for your team and how your overall output changes over time.

While chat notifications can help you to keep up with your automations on an immediate basis, the best way to gather more meaningful data on your automations is with an activity log.

An activity log is a database that records data each time any of your automations runs. You can build an activity log in any spreadsheet software you prefer, but we’d recommend using Airtable for its views and other features that support automation. 

At a minimum, your Activity log should include the automation’s name, a URL where it can be edited, an estimate of the time it saves each time it runs, and a link to any document(s) it created. 

To populate your activity log, just add a step at the end of each automation that creates a new record with all of the relevant data. 

As your automations run, your activity log will become a useful resource for measuring the efficacy of your Zaps, as well as your automations on other platforms like Integromat.

Three Steps to Debug Your Zaps

No matter your skill level, you're bound to encounter errors in your Zaps from time to time. When you do, you should try to answer three questions to quickly debug your Zap and find the issues causing errors or unexpected results:

1. Did the Zap actually run?

Check your activity log or the Zap history on Zapier. Is there a record of the Zap running when you expected it to? If not, the problem is likely in your Zap’s trigger. If it did run, continue on to Question 2. 

2. What data did the Zap run with?

Did your Zap run with the right dataset, and did it include all of the data needed for your Zap to work? If the trigger event alone doesn’t provide you with all of the data you need, you may need to connect to an Operational Database to provide additional information. 

3. Is your automation configured to handle the data your Zap ran with?

Did you set up your Zap to work with the data it ran with? This is often an issue when dealing with user-generated data, which can change substantially based on who’s creating it. You may have built your Zap assuming that all of your users would include a subject in their email, or that they would provide a full name in your contact form.

If your Zap doesn’t work with the data it’s encountering, you’ll need to use filters, paths, or other steps to accommodate the real-world scenarios you’re running into.

More often than not, answering these three questions will lead you to the heart of the problem. If you’re still running into issues, you can always reach out to XRay or other Zapier Experts for support. 

Make the Round Trip With Your New Assets and Resources

“Round-tripping” is our term for saving or referencing any new documents or resources created by your automation. It’s a simple way to ensure that the output of your automations doesn’t get lost, and can be accessed whenever you need it.

When an automation creates a new asset, be sure to save it (or a link to it) in a relevant database. For instance, if your automation creates a templated Weekly Meeting Agenda for you and your clients, you’ll likely want to save those agendas (or at least the latest one) in your Clients database. That way, you can have a record of everything you’ve discussed with the client week-to-week, and you can send them the agenda in case they’ve lost track of it. 

Round-tripping is a simple step, but it’s something that will help to keep you organized as you build an extensive automated infrastructure. When your automations are generating documents, presentations, and reports every hour, it can be easy to lose track of them if they aren’t being immediately saved for reference. 

Use Emoji Codes to Create Context in Zapier

Our last tip for this article might sound very simplistic, but it’s an extremely useful way to enhance your Airtable databases for Zapier automation. 

As you’re using Airtable in your automations, you’ll notice that Zapier doesn’t always give you much info about your Airtable fields. For instance, if you make a formula field in Airtable, Zapier won’t indicate that it’s a formula field in any way.

In fact, It will appear to let you add data into it as you build your Zap, but the formula field will reject any attempt to directly enter data, whether it’s through manual typing or automation. 

Adding emojis to your Airtable column titles is a great way to indicate the field type and how you should handle it as you’re building your automation. 

As you can see in the screenshot, we use a 🚫 prohibited emoji for formula fields to indicate that nothing should be entered there, a 🤖 robot face for fields that should be filled in by the automation, and 🙌 raised hands for fields that should be filled in manually later. 

All of these emojis show up in Zapier as well, making it easy for you to know what to do with each field. This might not seem very important when you’re building the Zap, but it will be very helpful when you come back to fix a new issue in the automation several months later. When the Zap’s structure is no longer fresh in your mind, reminders like this can be crucial to fixing up a broken Zap.

Automate at any Scale

Zapier is a versatile no-code tool for building automated workflows. As you go beyond building simple automations for yourself and start creating automated workflows to support your team or your entire company, you’ll face many challenges that come with automating at a larger scale.

Staying organized and using all of the tools at your disposal will help you to overcome those challenges and save time for your team. 

If you’d like to learn more about building an automated infrastructure, be sure to check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.