Rules & automation

A workflow is a rule you write once so Merchaint follows it every time: when something happens, do this. Everything else in this section is detail.

Your inbox. When a workflow needs a person it lands here, and so do documents that failed to read properly. Approve, reject, or retry — that is the whole job.

The whole shape of building one, start to finish. Create it, choose what starts it, add a step — and the table comes with the trigger, which is the part that surprises people.

The Library tab holds five ready-made workflows. Pick one and it builds the whole thing, which you then point at your own table and fields.

One workflow, two views of the same thing, and four buttons along the top. You will mostly live in the Form view — and there is no Save button.

The trigger is what starts your workflow. Every workflow has exactly one, and getting it right matters more than any other choice you make.

By default a trigger fires on every record in the table. Conditions cut that down to the records you actually care about.

An action is a step that does something. There are seventeen, in three groups. This page is the map; the two after it go deep on the ones you will use most.

The If / Or step asks a question about the record and splits into two paths. It is the step that turns "do this to everything" into "do this when it matters".

The Approval step stops the workflow and waits for a person. Approve, and it carries on. Reject, and it stops — and the decision is recorded on the record with a note.

A workflow does nothing until you switch it on, and the switch is on the workflow list. Draft is the default on purpose.

Switching a workflow on only affects what happens next. To run it over records already in your module, use Apply to existing records — the Backfill tab in the builder.

The Logs button in the builder opens every time this workflow ran, on which record, and what each step did. When someone asks "why did this invoice get flagged?", this page answers it.

Three options that control how this workflow behaves alongside others: priority, how deep a chain can go, and whether steps repeat. Most people never change them.

Workflows can bring records in from Xero or QuickBooks Online and send records back out. Before either works, someone has to connect the accounting system — and that happens somewhere else.

Pull from ERP brings records out of Xero or QuickBooks and into a Merchaint module — suppliers, customers, bills, invoices — on the schedule you set.

Push to ERP sends a Merchaint record out to Xero or QuickBooks — usually an approved invoice becoming a bill. This is the end of the line.

Field mapping decides which Merchaint column goes into which accounting-system field. Merchaint guesses it for you, and a guess is still a guess.