Most of Vylan is screens you click. The part that pays for itself is what happens between them — on an evening, on a Sunday, while you are with a client, with nobody watching.

That work is spread across four systems that do not talk to each other, which is deliberate: each one answers a different question, and none of them can overrule another. Knowing which is which is the difference between trusting the software and being surprised by it.

The four kinds

• Document automation — a file arrives and is read, identified, named, dated, shelved by year and category, and checked against what you actually asked for. Nobody presses anything.
• Workflow automation — the job walks its own stages. It hands itself to the right person, opens the client's document list, raises the invoice, and moves on when the thing it was waiting for genuinely happens. How a flow works.
• Task automation — when a task lands on a status, a rule you wrote in one sentence fires: put someone on it, tell someone, or message the client. Task automations.
• Payment automation — invoices raised at the moment you chose, chased on a cadence, and for clients who have agreed to it, charged to a card on file. Payment methods and auto-charge.

On top of those, Vylan runs eight scheduled sweeps of its own — a queue drained every two minutes, a recurring-work spawner every hour, and daily passes for work that needs attention, your KPI alerts and quiet leads.

Documents, as they arrive

A client uploading through their portal sets off a chain nobody has to start. The file is checked for being a byte-identical re-upload, read by the AI, matched against the checklist item it was meant to satisfy, given a proper name, and shelved under the right year and category so the files browser can find it later.

What that produces is a recommendation with a reason attached, not a decision. Approving and rejecting stays yours unless you deliberately turn on one of the auto-reject rules, and all of those ship off. See how Vylan checks documents.

The job's own running order

An engagement built from a flow does not sit still waiting to be noticed. Every time something real happens — a task ticked, a document approved, an invoice paid, a signature returned — Vylan re-reads the job from the beginning and asks which stage it genuinely belongs in.

That is why a job can move backwards. Reject a document on a job that had gone into preparation and it returns to collecting, because that is now true. A system that only ever moved forwards would be telling you the job was further along than it was.

When a task changes hands

Flow stages move an engagement. Task automations act on a single task, when a person moves it onto a status. One sentence each: when it becomes this, do that. They are the smallest automation in Vylan and the easiest to write.

The money

An invoice can raise itself at five different moments: when a payment stage begins, when a client accepts, when a repeating job spawns, when you mark the engagement complete, or a set number of days after that. Once raised, it chases itself.

And for a client who has saved a card and turned auto-charge on, the money can be taken without an email being sent at all.

What is already on, before you change anything

Worth knowing precisely, because defaults are what most firms actually run:

• Flows: on. Every firm runs the workflow engine, and every engagement built from a template follows its flow.
• Reading documents: on. The AI checks uploads on every engagement unless you switch it off for that one.
• Chasing clients for documents: on. Three reminders counted from the day you send — a gentle one at day 3, a firmer one at day 7, a deadline note at day 14 — and a fourth the day after the due date, on engagements that have one.
• Chasing unpaid invoices: on. Every 7 days, up to four times.
• Auto-rejecting documents: off. All four rules — unusable, wrong year, duplicate, missing pages — start off and stay off until you turn them on.
• Charging cards: off. Per client, and off for every client until somebody sets it.
• Invoicing on completion: off. You send invoices yourself unless you change the default.
• Emailing leads on their own: off. Nudges to a prospect who has gone quiet are opt-in.

What Vylan will never do by itself

Two are worth stating plainly, because both would be reasonable guesses and both are wrong.

• It does not file your documents to cloud storage. Copying a document into your Google Drive is always something a person triggers, from the engagement's Filing panel. There is no automatic run, and there is not going to be one. See filing to your Google Drive.
• It does not move money without permission on that specific client. Auto-charge is off by default and set per client, and a payment stage set to charge the card falls back to emailing the invoice for anyone who has not opted in.