Automate your work with Flows

A flow watches for something to happen, then runs the steps you set up: create a task, draft an email, post to Slack, update a field, or pause for a teammate’s approval. Flows live under Automation > Flows in the left nav. Every flow is a trigger connected to a series of steps on a visual canvas. Steps can branch on conditions, wait for time or data, and hand anything customer-facing to a human before it goes out.

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Create a flow

There are three ways to start, all from the Flows page:

• Describe it in plain language. The box at the top of the page is the primary way to create a flow. Type what you want, like “When health drops below 40, create an urgent task for the company owner”, and Trace AI turns it into a flow you can review and edit. This uses your workspace’s AI allowance.
• Start from a template. Click Start from a template for a library of prebuilt flows across categories like Onboarding, Renewal, Retention, Adoption, Feedback, and Operations, for example New-Customer Onboarding, Churn-Risk Save Motion, Health-Drop Risk Play, NPS Follow-up, and Renewal Reminder Sequence.
• Build on the canvas. Start from a blank canvas and connect the steps yourself.

Each path lands you in the editor. The flow saves as a draft while you work; nothing runs until you activate it.

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Triggers

A flow has exactly one trigger. These are the trigger types you can pick:

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Conditions and branching

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Actions

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Email send modes

Every Send Transactional Email step has a send mode:

• Draft for approval (default): the flow drafts the email and queues it in Triage. Approving it there sends it; nothing reaches the customer without a decision.
• Draft to CSM: the draft goes to the Company owner to send themselves. The flow never emails the customer directly.
• Auto-send: sends without approval. Auto-send needs enablement; a flow containing an auto-send email step cannot be activated. Switch the step to one of the draft modes to activate the flow.

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Personalize with merge fields

Email subjects, bodies, Slack messages, and task text accept merge tokens like {{company.name}}, plus context tokens for the Company owner and the person involved, and time codes for dates. The builder warns about tokens it cannot resolve, and a customer email with an unresolvable token is blocked from sending rather than delivered with a gap in it.

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Test a flow

A test run walks the whole flow against a real Company but fires no external side effects: no email, no Slack post, no webhook call, no sequence enrollment, no task, no notification. Each such step computes what it would have done and shows that in its output instead. You can also pin a step’s output in the editor; test runs then use the pinned data for that step instead of executing it, which is useful for testing downstream branches against fixed values. Flows with a Manual trigger also get a Run button in the editor toolbar. Unlike Test, Run executes the flow for real, side effects included.

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Activate a flow

Click Activate in the editor to turn a flow on, and Pause to stop it. A flow is always in one of four states: draft, active, paused, or archived. The flows list has a tab for each state and a switch on every row to turn flows on and off; turning one off can be undone from the toast. When you activate an enrolling flow (Segment Entry or Date Anchor), GainTrace asks what to do with Companies that already qualify:

• Only new (default): nobody enrolls now; Companies enroll as they cross the trigger in the future.
• Enroll existing: the Companies that qualify today enroll immediately. The dialog shows the count before you confirm, so a mass enrollment is always a deliberate choice.

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Control repeat runs

The flow’s Settings panel controls how often the same record can go through:

• Reapplication: run once ever, once if not currently active, multiple times if not active, or multiple runs in parallel.
• Cooldown (days): after a run finishes, block the same record from re-enrolling for this many days, so a flapping condition can’t re-fire the flow daily.
• Exclusion group: flows sharing a group name run one at a time per record, so two competing motions never overlap on the same Company.

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Runs and history

Open the run history panel at the bottom of the editor to see past runs: each run’s status, duration, and start time, with a step-by-step execution tree showing every step’s output or error. Selecting a run replays its step statuses on the canvas. The flows list shows each flow’s total runs and success rate, plus recent activity. Actions a flow takes on a Company, like tasks it created, are also recorded on that Company’s timeline. Run history is kept for 14 days, then pruned. In very high-volume workspaces older runs can be pruned sooner: only the most recent 10,000 runs are retained.

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Limits and failure behavior

• Per-step error handling. Every step has an On Error setting: Retry (up to 3 retries with backoff), Skip this step (the default; the run records the error and continues), or Halt the flow (the run is marked failed).
• Run timeout. A run that exceeds 10 minutes is marked failed.
• Concurrency. A workspace runs at most 10 flows at once; a run starting beyond that is rejected and the trigger does not queue. Test runs do not count against this limit.
• AI limits. AI steps and plain-language flow creation share your workspace’s AI allowance, with an additional cap of 1,000 AI executions per workspace per day.
• Auto-send emails. A flow with an auto-send email step can’t be activated; switch the step to one of the draft modes first. Surveys are always approval-only.
• Missing channels. A Slack step without a configured Slack destination, or a sequence step without a connected sequencer, records an error on that step; with the default Skip this step setting the rest of the flow still runs.

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Good to know

• The Slack step posts through the webhook in Settings > Signal Push, which is separate from connecting Slack as a data source. Add the webhook there before relying on Slack steps.
• Delays and waits are checked about once a minute, so a step can fire up to a minute after its exact due time.
• The editor supports undo and redo, a Tidy up layout command, and sticky notes on the canvas.
• Approvals from flows, including Approval Gate decisions and email drafts awaiting approval, all land in Triage.

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FAQ

Does a test run send anything to my customers? No. Test runs suppress every external side effect and show what each step would have done instead. Can a flow email customers without anyone approving? Not by default. Email steps default to draft for approval in Triage, and a flow with an auto-send step is blocked from activating. Surveys always require approval. What happens to a flow that is waiting on a delay when I pause it? Pausing stops new runs from starting. Waits themselves are durable and resume from where they left off when due. Why did my flow run once and never again for the same Company? Check the Reapplication setting and any cooldown in the flow’s settings. The default allows a re-run only when the previous run for that record is no longer active. How far back does run history go? 14 days, up to the most recent 10,000 runs. Older runs are pruned automatically.

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