Automate with Workflows / Lesson 2: Before Building Workflows

After you've signed up for a Dubsado account, your first goal is to learn to run your business manually, without using workflows. You're ready to move on to creating workflow templates when...

• You feel confident in your understanding of Dubsado features
• You have a method or process inside Dubsado that you repeat over and over
• You have created all the content templates that are part of that process

We talk to business owners who are setting up workflows everyday, and we can confirm that the users who have the most success take time to establish a business process before they build workflow templates. Often when people get overwhelmed, it's because they jump straight into building without a plan, leading to some unnecessary detours, roadblocks, and starting over.

The amount of time it will take you to set up your workflows depends on the complexity of your process and how complete your content is at the moment. If your process is simple and all of your emails, form templates and scheduler templates inside Dubsado are ready to be shared with clients, building a workflow template will not take a long time, because you're simply stringing together existing building blocks.

You will need time for testing your process in a sample project before the workflow is ready to use with real clients, but in theory you could be up and running in just a few days.

If your content is not completed, you'll need to tack on additional time to build, finalize and proofread each template inside each workflow. For a lot of users, this is the most time-consuming part of the process, especially if your business is brand new.

If your process is still being developed, or your process is extremely complex with multiple scenarios, it will take time deciding on a sequence, mapping everything out, identifying the content you need, and finalizing that content, before you can build the workflow templates and test them.

The more complex your process is, the more features and content that need to be set up and tested. This will require an investment of your time upfront, but will absolutely save you time and improve the management of your business in the long run.

There aren't really shortcuts when it comes to workflows, but understanding the features and content in your account will make a significant impact on your success. If you've been following along with the course you should be in great shape, but if you aren't feeling confident yet, this is the perfect time to circle back to the resources on projects, forms, getting paid and scheduling.