How to use Dubsado workflows to save you a TONNE of time (and stress!)
We’ve all got those annoying little tasks on our to do lists that just fill us with dread. Or make us fall asleep. Or we just hate, pure and simple.
They’re not mammoth tasks. They don’t require loads of creativity. They don’t even take that much time in the grander scheme of things.
But they’re repetitive. They’re boring time-sucks that we didn’t anticipate when we started our businesses. We love what we actually do, but these little tasks are necessary evils now that we’re apparently ‘business owners’.
If only there was a way we could ditch them, once and for all…
*drumroll please* Guess what?
THERE IS A WAY!
Saving you the time and stress of doing repetitive tasks over and over again is the entire point of Dubsado’s Workflow feature. And I’m about to tell you exactly how to use it to save you time, stress and money.
First thing first: what’s Dubsado?
If you’re new around here, you might not know what Dubsado is. It’s a funny old word, after all.
Dubsado is a piece of software that helps you run your business. It calls itself a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and it’s software that keeps track of your projects, invoices, calls, calendar - basically, everything to do with clients, Dubsado can help you with.
Dubsado specifically markets itself for creative business owners - so if you’re a photographer, cake maker, copywriter, social media manager, illustrator, or pretty much anything where you’re providing a creative service for your clients, Dubsado can help you to reduce the manual workload of managing those clients through from initial enquiry to project completion.
If that tickles your fancy and you want to get to know Dubsado a little better, I’ve got just the thing:
The Beginner’s Guide To Dubsado (and how it can take you from overwhelmed to killin’ it, fast)
Or…
3 Ways Dubsado Helps To Grow Your Creative Business
Or if you want to see exactly what kind of transformation Dubsado could give your business, you can read Liane’s story here.
And what are Dubsado Workflows?
Now that we know what Dubsado is, let’s get to the fun part: workflows.
Workflows are the part of Dubsado that make it freakin’ amazing as a time-saving, stress-busting, overwhelm-ditching tool - because they’re the thing that automates your boring-but-necessary processes so you don’t have to do them all the damn time.
Workflows take every tiny little part of your client processes and turn them into things that happen without needing your attention. Whether it’s scheduling a call with a client, sending an invoice or even sending a fully-branded jaw-dropping proposal to a potential client, a Dubsado Workflow can handle pretty much anything you throw at it, so you don’t have to.
Honestly, if you’re using Dubsado but you’re not utilising Workflows, you’re definitely not getting the most from Dubsado!
What can Dubsado Workflows do?
It might be quicker to tell you what they can’t do, but let’s give this a shot…
Dubsado Workflows can:
Send emails (along with GIFs, links, and buttons - all branded to your colours)
Schedule calls (no more call-booking ping-pong)
Send proposals (and they look STUNNING too - far better than your plain-text emails!)
Send contracts (that clients can digitally sign with the click of a button)
Send invoices (that clients can pay online, straight to your Stripe account)
Send questionnaires (full of all the juicy questions you need to ask them)
Send reminders (no more chasing unpaid invoices, hurrah!)
Organise your Projects (so you know exactly how your capacity is looking)
Create to do items for you (so even the bits you need to do are served to you on a plate)
They can be built using time-based triggers (e.g. ‘2 hours after a client completes Onboarding Questionnaire, send them Email #3’) or event triggers (e.g. ‘Create a new Project when the client submits Enquiry Form’) and can even trigger other Workflows too.
If you’ve ever created automated email sequences, Dubsado Workflows are a little bit like that - in that they’re a sequence of events planned out to do specific things at specific times, depending on specific things you or the client do at specific times. Which sounds more complicated than it is!
Let me give you a really basic example. Let’s imagine you’re a cake maker and you’re building a Dubsado Workflow for cake orders. Your Workflow would look a little something like this:
Client submits Enquiry Form via your website, where you collect details including the date they need their order, their budget and basic details about the cake they’re looking for
Dubsado creates a Project for the client in your Dubsado account
Dubsado adds the tag ‘New Cake Enquiry’ to the Project
Dubsado sends email ‘New Enquiry Response’ to the client - which you’ve written to let them know that you’ve received their enquiry and you’ll be in touch with them within 3 working days
Dubsado creates a to do for you: ‘Check enquiry details - approve or disapprove’
If you want to accept the enquiry, you go into Dubsado and hit ‘Approve’
Dubsado sends Form ‘Cake Proposal’ which details costs, shows previous cakes and includes a contract for the client to sign
Immediately after the client signs the contract, Dubsado sends Form ‘Cake Details’ - which asks for in-depth details about the cake the client wants, when they need it by, any specific requests, allergies, etc.
Immediately after a client completes that Form, Dubsado creates a to do for you: ‘Review cake details and book into calendar’
If you’re happy with the details provided by the client, you go into Dubsado to hit ‘Approve’ again (if there’s any info missing, you can contact the client directly)
Dubsado sends the client email ‘You’re all booked’ - confirming their order, collection information and invoicing details
Dubsado sends automatic invoice reminders 3 days before the invoice is due and on the due date - and the client pays in one click
You bake the cake, the client picks it up, and you’re all done!
It really is that simple: a Workflow is just a series of tasks (that you do manually right now) that are set to be actioned based on particular triggers, guiding your clients through a particular process (in this case, an onboarding process).
Easy peasy!
Getting started with Dubsado Workflows
If you’re still here, I’m gonna take a leap and say I’ve done my job amazingly well and convinced you that you need some Dubsado Workflow magic in your life, right?
Good. So where do we start?!
Building a Dubsado Workflow isn’t a difficult thing to do - but it does require some strategic thinking and planning before you jump straight into the shiny fun stuff (like Dubsado’s new form builder, which I adore using).
Step One: Brain Dump
Grab yourself a piece of paper or a Google Doc and get dumping. Seriously. Every tiny little thing you currently do with clients right now needs to get out of your brain and onto (digital or physical) paper.
If that feels overwhelming, narrow it down slightly: brain dump everything you do for your bestselling service, from the moment someone enquires to the moment the project is finished.
Don’t worry about writing things in order or neatly or anything like that - we just need all of that information down on the page so we can start organising it all.
Step Two: Fantasise
Now you know what currently happens in your process for that service, it’s time to have a think about how you want that process to look.
In an absolutely ideal world, when you had all the time, all the resources and all the creativity you could ever need, what would the client experience for that service include? Would you send them flowers in the post? Would you streamline your forms so they’re enjoyable to use? Would you ditch discovery calls once and for all?!
Get imagining and jot down any ideas for what your ideal process would look like.
Step Three: Organise
Now that you’ve got your current and ideal process down on paper in a rough way, it’s time to start organising. If you’ve gone down the old-fashioned route of using actual paper, now’s the time to whip out the post-it notes and get creative!
The goal now is to organise every task that’s involved in a client project into a timeline of what happens when - remembering to add in your extra ideal bits in the right places too. Make sure you’re clear on how long the gaps between tasks need to be as well, so that you know what to set your triggers too when it comes to the Workflow build.
You might think you know the exact order of every task already, but be open-minded - sometimes you’ll find that when you put everything together it actually makes more sense to do things slightly differently than you have been, and now’s the chance to get that strategy sorted!
Step Four: Label The Lingo
Dubsado has its own little language when it comes to the things your Workflows can do, so it’s now time to start getting your head around what each of your tasks would translate into in Dubsado-land. Work through every task in your process and decide what kind of ‘thing’ it needs to be in Dubsado-land, then label it with the right bit of Dubsado-talk.
For example, you might have a task in your list that says ‘Send client a booking link for a Discovery Call’ - in Dubsado-talk, that translates as ‘Send appointment scheduler Discovery Call immediately after all previous actions complete’. Or your task ‘Raise invoice for client deposit’ would translate to ‘Send primary invoice 0.25 hours after an appointment has ended’.
The bits of terminology you’ll be using most are likely to be:
Project: each new enquiry is a new Project in Dubsado. A Project is associated with a particular client and will have a contract attached to it. You can apply multiple Workflows to a client’s Project when you’re working on a particular service with them.
Tag: a Tag is a label that you can give to Projects, to track whatever you need to track. For example, if you offer more than one level of a particular service, you might like to use Tags to specify which level a Project is using. You can use Tags to filter Projects, filter revenue reports, etc.
Email: fairly obviously, an Email in a Dubsado Workflow is an email sent from you to the client. You can also see emails the client has sent to you too, but your Workflow will trigger Emails going out to the client.
Contract: again, fairly obvious. A Contract is a legally binding document that sets out whatever you need it to for a particular Project. Clients can sign Dubsado Contracts digitally and you can counter-sign. A copy will be sent to the client and saved in your Dubsado account for reference.
Invoice: another obvious thing! An Invoice can be sent via Dubsado and paid by your clients using Stripe, PayPal or directly into your bank account (just make sure you factor in processing fees if you’re using Stripe or PayPal!). Your Dubsado Workflow can also send reminders for unpaid invoices.
Forms: Dubsado Forms are a little bit different to just bog-standard forms because you can use a Form in so many different ways. Your enquiry form can be built in Dubsado and added to your website with a line of code, but your Proposal documents will also be built as Forms in Dubsado, so that your client can interact with the Proposal to accept it or add on any extras they might want.
Scheduler: a Dubsado Scheduler is an appointment booking system. You can set up multiple Schedulers for different types of appointments, e.g. a 15-minute discovery call or a 60-minute kick-off call, and connect the Scheduler to your calendar to avoid any double-booking. You can also specify how many appointments you take in one day, how long you need between appointments, and how far in advance a client can book an appointment.
Portal: a client Portal is an interactive place where you and your clients can access everything to do with your project. Contracts, Forms and Schedulers for a specific project can be found in a client Portal and you can customise it with your branding and add in any external links that the client might need too. Portals are optional for client Projects, but can be really helpful!
Step Five: Build
Now for the fun part: the build!
(Let’s face it, if you’re an organisational-nerd like I am, ALL OF THIS IS FUN - but this part is particularly fun!)
Jump into your Dubsado account, click Templates, then Workflows, then Add Workflow - and now you can turn your incredibly well-organised and highly-strategised Workflow map into a real life Workflow!
Add in timings, triggers, approvals for things you don’t want to be completely automated, and have fun designing your Forms, proposals, client portals and invoices.
There’s probably a fair amount of stuff to do in Dubsado at this point, depending on how complex your Workflow is, but remember - this is the last time you’ll have to do these tasks, because your shiny new Dubsado Workflow will be doing everything for you soon enough!
Step Six: TEST TEST TEST!
This step is really important!
You’ve spent time making sure your Workflow is built in exactly the way you want it to be, so it’s really important that you make sure it’s running in exactly the way you want it to run too.
Workflows in Dubsado are really intuitive and simple to build, but, like with any piece of software, there are usually some quirks to iron out before it’s 100% perfect. Test every Workflow yourself and ask willing volunteers (lucky friends and family members) to test things out too - because even if something makes perfect sense to you, it might be completely illogical to someone else.
At the very least, test your Workflows yourself BEFORE your clients start using them!
Finally, enjoy the time, stress & overwhelm your Dubsado Workflows are saving you 🙌
Once your first Workflow is running smoothly, your life will be forever changed. And you’ll quickly be blocking out time in your calendar to get Workflows built for every single process in your business.
And the best part? You’ll actually have time to do that - because your first Workflow has eased the pressure off your to do list already!
Like most new things, Dubsado can take a little while to get your head around and get set up in a way that works best for you - but boooooy is it worth it (and if you don’t believe me, Liane agrees).
If you’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of knowing you need automation but not having the time to set it up because you’re too busy doing all the things you need to automate (phew), I can take that off your plate for you, easy peasy.
My Dubsado Setup service covers everything you need to get up and running with Dubsado - including 2 custom Workflows built for you (and strategised with you), training sessions to get you familiar with your new system, and a month of support after the build is finished too. If you’re desperate for automation but without needing to commit hours and hours to get everything set up, it’s perfect for you - get yourself booked in here.