Automations

Automations are simple "when this happens, do that" rules that run in the background. Every team starts with a sensible set already switched on — you can see, edit, disable or extend them under Automations in the sidebar, either as classic dropdowns or in a drag-and-drop builder.

What runs out of the box

Money

Invoice reminders at every stage: coming due, due today, 1 / 7 / 14 / 30 days overdue → the team is notified and the (approval-gated) reminder email is prepared.

Selling

A website form submission → the team is notified, with everything the form carried.
Unanswered offers → the 7/14/30-day follow-up cadence.

Housekeeping

An integration connection that expired → notification to reconnect.
Shopify orders and Mollie payment updates → notifications, invoices where relevant. When an order or a subscription creates an invoice, the notification carries its PDF and an Open invoice button.
A Shopify refund → notification. The refund becomes a credit note in your books either way; this is what tells you it happened.
Your shop charging the wrong VAT rate → notification. Your shop decides the rate at checkout, but only Voltane can see your whole turnover, and that is what decides whether a sale to another EU country is taxed there or at home. When the two disagree — say your shop still charges 21% on a German order after you registered for the One Stop Shop — you hear about it on the first order, not at the end of the quarter. If your shop's prices include VAT, the invoice states the rate you actually owe: your customer still paid exactly what they were charged, and only the split between price and VAT moves. If your prices exclude VAT, the invoice stays as charged. Either way, what needs changing is the tax setting in your shop.

Editing rules

Each automation is a trigger + optional condition + one or more actions, with a schedule where it makes sense. Rename, deactivate or delete anything; the "run now" button executes a rule immediately if you don't want to wait for its schedule. Everything an automation does is logged, so you can always see what ran, when, and for which customer or document.

Letting a rule write to the customer

Most rules tell your team something. A few can tell the customer instead — that's the action called Send a notification to the customer, and what arrives depends on what happened:

a Shopify order became an invoice → the invoice;
a refund became a credit note → the credit note;
a Mollie payment came in → a payment confirmation;
someone filled in a form on your website → their own message back to them, so they know it arrived.

It's switched off everywhere until you turn it on. Nothing reaches a customer because we assumed you'd want it to — tick it on the rule that should do it, and the mail goes out in the customer's own language, with replies coming back to you.

Seeing what a rule would do, before it does it

Open any automation and you'll find what this would have done over the last 90 days, above the log of what it actually did.

It's a preview — nothing is sent, created or changed. You get how many times the rule would have fired, and up to five real examples by name, with dates and amounts, so you can check a couple and see for yourself rather than take our word for it.

Some rules can't be previewed. Ones that fire on an event — a form being submitted, a payment arriving — need a record of those events, and we don't keep one for every kind. Where we can't work it out we say so, rather than show you a zero that reads like "this rule would do nothing".

When a rule stops running

An automation that quietly stops is worse than one that was never switched on: everything looks fine until a customer asks why they never heard from you.

At the top of the automations list you'll see any rule that's stopped doing its job: one that used to run and hasn't for a while, or one that was switched on but has never run at all.

We measure lateness against the rule's own schedule, so a daily rule that's missed a couple of days shows up while a monthly one doesn't. And we wait for two missed runs before saying anything — one skipped run is usually nothing, and a warning you see every morning is a warning you stop reading.

When a scheduled rule misses its own cadence twice over, you also get a notification naming it. You'll hear about each breakage once — a rule that's been broken for a fortnight doesn't nag you every morning — and again if another rule stops.

Rules you've switched off yourself are listed separately, and never reported. That's your decision, not a fault — but it's worth seeing, because "we turned it off for a minute" is the most common reason a business quietly stops being automated.

Starting from a template

If you haven't set much up yet, the automations page offers a few ready-made sets that suit different kinds of business — chasing offers nobody answered, keeping an eye on your connections.

The button tells you how many rules it will turn on, and that's exactly how many appear. Rules your plan doesn't include aren't counted.

Applying a template only ever adds. Anything you've already set up is left alone — including rules you deliberately switched off. We won't turn those back on behind your back.

Once you've got everything covered the templates stop appearing, because there'd be nothing left for them to do.