The fastest way to find what to automate is to look at what other teams already have. Below are 22 workflow automation examples, grouped by team, each described by its trigger, what it does and what it saves. Most can be built in an afternoon on data you already have.
Sales
1. Lead routing
Trigger: new lead form submission. Steps: enrich the company, score fit, assign to a rep by region and segment, notify them in Slack. Saves: leads waiting hours for someone to claim them.
2. Discount approval
Trigger: a rep requests a discount above 15%. Steps: route to the sales manager, then to finance above 30%, update the quote when approved. Saves: approvals lost in email threads.
3. Closed-won handoff
Trigger: deal marked closed-won. Steps: create the customer account, open an onboarding checklist, assign a customer success manager. Saves: the gap between signature and kickoff.
4. Stale deal alerts
Trigger: daily schedule. Steps: find deals with no activity for 14 days, message the owner with a list. Saves: deals quietly dying in the pipeline.
Customer support
5. Ticket triage
Trigger: new ticket. Steps: classify with AI, tag the customer's plan, route to the right queue, escalate urgent ones. Saves: manual sorting at the start of every shift.
6. Refund requests
Trigger: agent opens a refund on an order. Steps: auto-approve under $50, route higher amounts to a lead, issue the refund through the payment API. Saves: switching between the help desk and the payment dashboard.
7. SLA escalation
Trigger: ticket approaching its SLA. Steps: alert the team lead, reassign if unassigned. Saves: missed response targets.
8. Satisfaction follow-up
Trigger: low CSAT score. Steps: open a follow-up task for the account manager with the ticket history. Saves: unhappy customers nobody calls back.
Finance
9. Invoice processing
Trigger: invoice email arrives. Steps: extract vendor, amount and due date, match to a purchase order, route mismatches for review. Saves: manual data entry into the accounting system.
10. Expense approvals
Trigger: expense submitted. Steps: check policy limits, route to the manager, flag exceptions to finance. Saves: finance chasing managers for sign-off.
11. Overdue invoice reminders
Trigger: invoice passes its due date. Steps: send reminders at 3, 10 and 30 days, alert the account owner at 30. Saves: late payments nobody noticed.
12. Month-end reports
Trigger: last day of the month. Steps: build revenue, expenses and cash reports from live data and send them to leadership. Saves: a day of spreadsheet work.
Operations
13. Purchase requests
Trigger: request form. Steps: route by amount and category, create the purchase order once approved, notify the supplier. Saves: purchases stuck waiting for the right approver.
14. Inventory reorders
Trigger: stock below reorder point. Steps: draft a purchase order with the suggested quantity for a buyer to confirm. Saves: stockouts.
15. Vendor onboarding
Trigger: new vendor request. Steps: collect documents, run checks, get finance and legal sign-off, create the vendor record. Saves: weeks of back-and-forth.
16. Order exception handling
Trigger: order fails payment, address or stock check. Steps: put it in an exceptions queue with the reason and suggested fix. Saves: orders silently stuck.
HR
17. Employee onboarding
Trigger: signed offer. Steps: create accounts, request equipment, assign a checklist to HR, IT and the manager. Saves: new hires starting without a laptop.
18. Offboarding
Trigger: last working day set. Steps: schedule access removal, equipment return and final pay. Saves: accounts left active after people leave.
19. Time-off requests
Trigger: leave request. Steps: check balance, route to the manager, update the team calendar. Saves: manual balance tracking.
IT and data
20. Access requests
Trigger: employee requests access to a system. Steps: route to the system owner, grant access, log the decision. Saves: access granted without a record.
21. Data quality checks
Trigger: nightly schedule. Steps: find duplicate customers and missing fields, send a fix list to the data owner. Saves: bad data spreading to reports.
22. Incident notifications
Trigger: monitoring alert. Steps: open an incident record, page the on-call engineer, post a status update. Saves: minutes in the first response.
How to choose your first workflow
Pick the one that runs most often, follows clear rules and currently involves copying data between systems. Build the smallest version, get people using it, then add steps.
Build these workflows with Jet Admin
Jet Admin builds workflows on the data you already have, from 200+ integrations including Postgres, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Zendesk and REST APIs. You describe the workflow and Jet generates the triggers, steps, approval queues and screens. Workflows and users are unlimited on every plan; granular permissions, SSO and audit logs are on the Business plan and above. For the basics, see our workflow automation guide.
Frequently asked questions
What is an example of workflow automation?
Routing a refund request to a team lead above $50 and issuing it through the payment API once approved is a typical example.
Which workflows should be automated first?
Frequent, rule-based workflows that currently involve copying data between systems.
Can workflow automation include AI?
Yes. AI steps can classify, extract and draft inside a workflow, with people approving the risky steps.
Do I need developers to build these?
Most of these can be built with no-code tools. Developers help with unusual integrations or custom logic.
Start with one workflow this week
Start with Jet Admin for free and build your first workflow on the data you already have.