Most of what a firm does to a job is the same every time. A tax return always needs documents in, a letter signed, the work done, a review, a bill. What changes is the client, not the order.

An automation is that order, written down once. Every engagement built from it starts at the first stage and walks the same path — collecting what it needs, firing what should fire, and moving on when the thing it was waiting for actually happens.

Where they live

Automations have their own home. Open Automations and you get every flow your firm has, as a card each: what it is called, how many stages it runs, and one line describing how it ends.

Click a card and you land on that automation's own page, where you can see the whole flow laid out and change it.

The four that come with Vylan

Your firm starts with four flows already built, marked Built-in:

• Tax return flow — documents in, letter signed, prepared, reviewed, billed.
• GST/QST return flow — the shorter version, for a filing rather than a return.
• Monthly bookkeeping flow — the recurring one, ending at the invoice.
• New client onboarding flow — everything you need from somebody the first time.

Built-ins cannot be edited, on purpose: they are the floor everybody's firm starts from, and an accidental edit to one would change how new engagements behave across your whole practice with nothing to compare against. When you want one of them but slightly different, use Clone to customize — you get your own copy, identical, and yours to change.

Making your own

1. Open Automations and choose New automation.
2. Give it a name that describes when you would reach for it. Rush T1 — no review step tells you more in six months than "Flow 2" does.
3. Pick what to Start from — an existing flow to base it on, or nothing.
4. Create, then build out the stages.

How an engagement picks one up

An engagement gets its flow from the template it was created from, and the engagement page says which one under This engagement runs. You can change it for that one job without touching the automation itself — the flow shows Customized for this engagement when you have, so it is obvious later why that job behaved differently from its siblings.

This is the important half: editing an automation changes how future engagements run, not the ones already in flight. A job that is halfway through keeps the flow it started with, because changing the rules underneath a job in progress is how work gets lost.