Choose how your flow starts | Flomation Guides

Every flow begins with a trigger: the thing that sets it off. Pick the right one and your flow runs by itself at exactly the right moment.

01Which trigger?

Triggers are steps like any other: click Add Node and find them under Building blocks›Triggers, or search by name.

If the job should run…	Use
When you say so	Manual Trigger
At set times, like every weekday at 9am	Schedule Trigger
When someone fills in a form	Form Trigger
When another system sends Flomation a message	Webhook Trigger
When someone scans a code, on a poster or at a desk	QR Code Trigger
When something happens in another app, like a booking in Calendly or a new email in Gmail	That app's trigger

The Add Node menu open at Building blocks, Triggers, listing app triggers such as Acuity Scheduling, Airtable, Apollo and Asana. — There are dozens of triggers. Most are for specific apps.

Build with the Manual Trigger, then switch

Every new flow starts with a Manual Trigger. Keep it while you build, so the flow only runs when you say. Add the real trigger once everything works.

02Run it yourself: Manual Trigger

The Manual Trigger runs the flow when you click Execute Flo in the editor, or the play button next to the flow on the Flows page.

It can also ask for information each time. Click the Manual Trigger, then + Add Input, and fill in:

A name such as customer_name. Later steps use this name.
A type: Text, Number, Checkbox, Multiline Text, Date or Dropdown.
A label for people to read, an optional hint and default, and whether it's Required.

The Manual Trigger's Trigger Inputs with one input: name customer_name, type Text, label Customer name, placeholder e.g. Alex Morgan, and Required ticked. — An input called `customer_name`.

Now, when you click Execute Flo, Flomation asks for those values before it runs:

The Execute Flow window asking for a Customer name, with Cancel and Execute buttons. — Required inputs must be filled in before it will run.

Each input is then available to the steps after the trigger, under its name, in the $ list. A flow can have only one Manual Trigger.

03On a schedule: Schedule Trigger

Runs the flow at the times you choose, with no one needing to be there.

Choose a Schedule Mode, then fill in the fields it shows:

Schedule Mode	For example	You also set
Every interval	Every 15 minutes	Interval and Unit (Minutes, Hours or Days)
Daily at a specific time	Every day at 07:30	Time of Day
Weekly on specific days	Weekdays at 09:00	Time of Day, Days of Week
Monthly on specific dates	The 1st and 15th of each month	Time of Day, Dates of Month (including Last day of month)
Monthly on a weekday	The last Friday of each month	Time of Day, Which Week, Weekday
Yearly on a date	Every 1 April	Time of Day, Month, Day of Month

Schedule Trigger settings: Weekly on specific days, Time of Day 09:00, Monday to Friday, Timezone Europe/London, and Exclude UK Bank Holidays ticked. — Every weekday at 9am UK time, skipping bank holidays.

Time of Day uses the 24-hour clock: 09:00, 17:30.
Always fill in Timezone, for example Europe/London. Without it, times follow the server's clock, not yours.
Exclude UK Bank Holidays skips bank holidays in England and Wales.
For Every interval, choose a Unit too. Without one, the schedule never runs.

A schedule is live as soon as the flow saves

There's no on/off switch. The first run is at the next matching time; for Every interval, one interval after you save. To stop a schedule, delete the Schedule Trigger step, or the whole flow.

04From a form: Form Trigger

Flomation hosts the form for you. Build its fields in the trigger, then share its Trigger URL. Build your first flow walks through one from start to finish.

Two settings worth knowing:

After submission sets the button text and what happens next: show a thank-you message, reset the form for another response, or send people to a web page of your choice.
Require login only lets signed-in Flomation users view and submit the form. Leave it off for public forms.

05From a web address: Webhook Trigger

Gives your flow its own web address. Anything that calls that address, such as another app or a script, starts the flow.

A Webhook Trigger's settings showing its Trigger URL, an address on launch.flomation.app, with a copy button. — The address appears once the flow has saved. Copy it with the button on the right.

Paste the Trigger URL into the other system, usually in a setting called webhook or notification URL.
If it sends data in JSON format, each top-level field becomes a value your later steps can use.
Flomation replies straight away and runs the flow in the background.

Keep the address private

A Webhook Trigger has no password: anyone who knows its address can start your flow. Only share it with the system that needs it.

Need the caller to get an answer back, like a small web service? That's the Web Trigger, used with a Web Response step at the end. It's an advanced feature, set up with the Embed SDK or Gateway pages.

06From a QR code: QR Code Trigger

Shows a QR code in the trigger's settings. Anyone who scans it starts the flow: handy for check-ins, sign-in sheets and "tell us about a problem" posters.

A QR Code Trigger's settings showing its Trigger URL and the top of the QR code. — The code appears under the Trigger URL.

To print it, copy the Trigger URL into any QR code maker, or take a screenshot of the code. There's no download button yet.
When someone scans it, they see QR Code Scanned: Your request has been received, and the flow runs.
The flow gets the time of the scan and the scanner's device details. It doesn't know who scanned it.

07When something happens in an app

Many apps have their own trigger, named after the app: Calendly Webhook Trigger, Zendesk Webhook Trigger, Email Trigger for Gmail, and many more. They start your flow when something happens there, such as a new booking, a new ticket or a new email.

How you set one up depends on the app:

Flomation sets it up for you. For apps such as Calendly, Zendesk, Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday.com, Mailchimp and WooCommerce, fill in the trigger's connection and choose which events you want. Flomation registers itself with the app when the flow saves.
You paste an address into the app. For some apps, such as GitHub, GitLab and Intercom, the trigger shows an address to paste into the app's webhook settings, often with instructions underneath.
Flomation checks for you. Some triggers look for new items every so often instead: the Gmail Email Trigger checks about once a minute, and the Airtable Trigger checks a table on an interval.

Most app triggers' descriptions in Add Node say which kind they are. For the fields each one needs, see the integration reference.

Gmail: add the account to the trigger

The Gmail Email Trigger reads from the accounts connected in the trigger itself. Save the flow, open the trigger and use Add Email read Account to sign in to the mailbox it should watch.

08More than one trigger

A flow can have several triggers. For example, a form and a weekly schedule can start the same steps. A few rules:

Only one Manual Trigger per flow.
Don't add two triggers of the same kind, such as two Webhook Triggers. They'd share one address, and only the last one saved would work. Use two flows instead.
Execute Flo runs the flow without real data when it has no Manual Trigger. It starts from another trigger with nothing in it, so a step that writes somewhere could add blank entries. Test such flows through their real trigger, like submitting the form.

09Next steps

Building flows Pass information between steps Use what the trigger received in the steps that follow. Read it → Running & monitoring Check your runs and fix failures See every time your trigger fired, and what happened next. Read it →