Building workflows
This guide walks you through creating, testing, and publishing an automated workflow. Workflows combine trigger events, system connections, conditional logic, and human approval steps to automate a business process end to end.
What you can automate
Section titled “What you can automate”A workflow is a step-by-step sequence that connects your enterprise tools to complete a task automatically. Typical multi-step routines include:
- Ticket triage — reading incoming support tickets, categorizing urgency, drafting a response, and routing it to the right agent.
- Lead enrichment — pulling new leads from a web form, looking up company details, updating the CRM, and posting a summary to Slack.
- Report generation — aggregating data from multiple systems on a schedule and delivering a digest to executive channels.
How to build a workflow
Section titled “How to build a workflow”-
Define the process and goal. Before opening the builder, outline the manual process you want to automate. What event starts it? Which systems need to be read from or updated? Where should a person double-check the work?
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Start a new workflow. Navigate to Workflows in the left navigation, click Create Workflow, and choose to start from scratch, pick an existing template, or have RivalBot generate a preliminary draft from a plain-language description.
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Configure the trigger. Choose how the workflow starts:
- Manual / on-demand — a user triggers it directly inside Rival.
- Scheduled (rituals) — it runs on a recurring schedule: hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.
- Webhook / app event — a connected external tool sends an event notification that starts the run.
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Add action steps and logic. Use the drag-and-drop canvas, or RivalBot, to sequence your steps. Connect actions from your authorized connectors, add transformation steps to format text, aggregate numbers, or clean inputs, and set up conditional branches for edge cases and different priority levels.
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Insert approval gates for sensitive steps. Place an Approval Gate before any step that modifies critical records, sends external communications, or initiates financial transactions. Select the step, enable Human Approval Required, and designate the approver role or manager group responsible for reviewing it. See Approval workflows.
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Test in the sandbox. Before publishing to your team, run interactive tests in the sandbox viewer. Provide test inputs and watch execution step by step, verify that data flows correctly between steps and that error handling fires as expected, and confirm approval notifications reach the right approver’s queue.
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Save, version, and publish. Assign a clear title, description, and input guidance for end users, then tag the release with a version number. If you are publishing for organization-wide adoption, submit the workflow to the Requests queue for administrator review and Marketplace inclusion. See Versions and publishing.
Design best practices
Section titled “Design best practices”- Keep workflows modular. Instead of one massive workflow handling dozens of unrelated steps, break complex routines into smaller, focused workflows.
- Build in fail-safes. Add fallback paths or alert notifications for when an external API or system connection errors out.
- Limit sensitive access. Use connectors configured with least-privilege permissions, and keep credentials in secrets rather than in step configuration. See Connector governance.