Turning it on
A workspace that has not joined the beta sees Workflows greyed out in the sidebar, and the page says how to join. A workspace admin or the workspace owner joins by accepting the Beta Programme Terms in Workspace settings › Workspace, under Beta programme and developer support (see Workspace settings). Everybody else can read that card and see who can change it.
Leaving the beta closes the module for the workspace. Nothing is deleted: workflows, their jobs and their history come back on rejoining. Tasks a workflow already put on people's lists stay there as ordinary tasks. While the workspace is out of the beta, nothing new starts.
The library
A workspace with more than a couple of processes lands on a library. Read it By category, as All, as Mine (the processes you own) or as Due for a check-up (the ones past the date their owner said they would look at them again). New workflow starts one. Open a workflow and the page narrows to that workflow's own tabs; Library takes you back.
Each card says whether the workflow is Live, a Draft or Archived, what each job is about ("One per lead"), what starts it, and three figures: jobs open, the average time a job takes to finish, and how often a stage runs late. A figure Rople cannot measure yet shows "—" rather than a nought.
If your workspace made a module for one process in Builder, that module opens straight into its workflow and never shows the library.
A workflow
The header says whether the workflow is Live, a Draft or Archived, and how its jobs start:
- A workflow that starts on its own says Starts when and the event, such as "a lead is added", with Start one by hand beside it for a record that arrived before the workflow did.
- A workflow started by hand has Start a job.
Edit workflow opens it in the same four questions it was made with. More holds two panes and two actions: About this workflow, How jobs start, Duplicate and Save as template.
Three figures sit across the top: Jobs in progress, Sitting still (jobs past their stage's time limit) and Needs a hand (jobs waiting for somebody to pick an outcome or fill in a detail).
The tabs are Board, Stages & steps, Details and Analytics.
Board
One set of jobs, four ways of looking at it: Table, Board, Calendar and Gallery. Every view reads the same jobs, so there is never a second copy to disagree with the first. The calendar uses a Date detail; a workflow with none says how to add one.
A job moves on by itself when its steps are done. It is sitting still when it has stayed in a stage longer than that stage's time limit, measured from when it arrived; the Sitting still chip shows only those. A new workflow with no jobs yet says where the first one will come from.
A manager can move a job with Move to…, and its history records that. Cancel job asks first, because it closes the job's open tasks and cannot be undone.
A job sitting with you past its time limit also appears in My work.
Stages and steps
A stage says where a job is. A step is what somebody actually does inside it: who does it, when it is due, what ticks it off, and any details it records.
When a job reaches a stage, its steps become tasks for the people who own them, so they appear in their My work and in Work › Tasks. A step can tick itself off when something happens elsewhere in Rople:
- they mark the task done;
- a call, WhatsApp or email is logged on the lead;
- the lead moves to a new stage;
- a milestone on the project changes;
- a file is attached to the task;
- the payment gets a receipt number in Finance;
- a client account is opened for the lead.
The tab draws the process as a map, one row per person or role, and lists each stage's steps in words.
Editing a live workflow saves a new version. New jobs follow the changes; jobs already going finish the way they started. A job left in a stage the edit removed shows in a From before an edit column, to be moved into a current stage.
Details
Each stage keeps a table of what it produced: the details recorded at that stage plus the ones every job carries. That makes the output of a process findable by kind instead of one job at a time.
Analytics
How long jobs take, where they stop, which stage is holding them, and how often a job is sent back to an earlier stage. A workflow that looks fine on the board and takes eleven days at one stage is what this tab shows.
More
Two panes and two actions, read when the process is designed rather than every day.
About this workflow. Its owner, purpose, how often to check it, and its history of changes. This is also where it is archived. Archiving stops new jobs and asks what to do with the ones going now: Let them finish, or Cancel them now.
How jobs start. What starts this workflow, and what happened each time something might have started it. The figures count what Started, what was Ignored as repeats (the same thing happening twice), what is Waiting to start (it matched but is missing something) and what Couldn't start. Something waiting to start begins by itself once it has what it needs, or with Check again. Anything missed? finds records that match and never started, and Start them now starts them.
Duplicate and Save as template are below.
Creating a workflow
New workflow offers three starts:
- Start from a template: one of your workspace's own templates, or one of Rople's (such as lead follow-up or client onboarding), pre-filled and fully editable.
- Describe it in your own words: a paragraph, which Rople turns into a draft of the four questions for you to check.
- Answer four questions, one at a time.
The questions are:
- The process. Its name, why it exists, what finishes it, its category and its owner.
- What starts it. By hand, or an event in Leads, Projects, People, Finance, Tasks, Time or Workflows: a lead is added, a lead moves to a stage, a deal is won and its inventory is sold, a project is created, a person joins, a payment is received, a task is completed, a schedule, a date on a record, or another workflow finishes. Only start for… narrows which records start it, and Hold until it has… holds a record until it is ready.
- The stages. Their names and time limits.
- The steps, and what they record. Each step shows who does it, what ticks it off and a sentence saying when it appears and is due; Change timing changes that. More holds what happens next for each result, when the step is needed at all, reminders, chasing, instructions and the step's KPI. A step that already has results or conditions always shows them.
Leaving the questions with answers in them asks first. Publish workflow puts it live, and it starts listening. Anything still missing is listed beside it, each linked to the question that answers it.
Duplicate and templates
Both live under More on a workflow, and under ⋯ on its card in the library, for anybody who can create workflows.
Duplicate opens a new workflow on question 1 with everything filled in from the one you copied, named "… (copy)" and owned by you. Nothing is created until you publish it. If the original starts on its own, the copy says so: while both are live and start on the same thing, every lead (or project, or person) starts both. Change what starts the copy, add an "Only start for…" rule, or archive the original.
| Copied | Not copied |
|---|---|
| Purpose, what finishes it, category | Jobs, in progress or finished, and their timelines |
| What starts it, with its rules and schedule | Version history: the copy starts at its first version |
| Stages and their time limits | Analytics and step KPI history |
| Steps: who does them, timing, what ticks them off, outcomes, reminders, chasing, guides, task wording | Items waiting to start, and the record of what started |
| The details each stage records | The process owner: it is you, and you can change it |
| The view it opens on | The check-up date, which starts from publishing |
Duplicate copies the live version. Unpublished changes to the original are not included.
Save as template keeps a workflow's set-up so anybody here who can create workflows can start from it. It appears under Your templates when you choose Start from a template, above Rople's own. A template keeps the steps' named people, and you can change them each time you use it. It leaves behind the jobs, the history and the owner, and any "Only start for…" rule that names one project, KPI, client, item, workflow, campaign or person, so a workflow made from it does not listen to that one record. Somebody named on a step who has since left is replaced by the process owner when the template is used.
Each template shows who saved it and when. The person who saved it, or a manager and above, can delete it from its ⋯. Workflows already made from it are not affected. To change a template, make a workflow from it, save that as a new template, and delete the old one.
How it connects
- Steps become tasks, so they appear in My work and in Work › Tasks (see Tasks, meetings and to-dos).
- A job sitting with you past its allowance raises a row in My work.
- Builder is where a workspace turns one workflow into a module of its own.
- Owned steps can become KPIs: Review proposed KPIs suggests them, and completing the task logs the score (see Goals and KPIs).
Common questions
Workflows is greyed out in my sidebar. Your workspace has not joined the beta. A workspace admin or the owner can join it in Workspace settings › Workspace.
What happens to jobs already going when I edit a workflow? They finish the way they started. New jobs follow your changes.
Why didn't something start my workflow? Open More › How jobs start. "Didn't match the rules" means it did not fit Only start for…. "Waiting — missing something" means it matched and is not ready yet under Hold until it has…. Each one is listed under What happened.
Can one workflow start another? Yes. "Another workflow finishes" is an event a workflow can start on, and the new job is about the same record.