What we built this week

Field agents can book a lead over WhatsApp in any order, and are told what is still missing

When a field agent is with a client, they should not have to remember to send name, then number, then date, then time, in exactly the right order. One wrong step and the whole conversation starts again.

For companies with AI actions switched on, agents can now send a lead over WhatsApp the way they think of it, all in one message or spread across a few, in any order. The bot reads what it has, confirms it back, and tells the agent exactly what is still needed.

For example: an agent sends "New lead Thandi Mokoena 082 555 1234 tomorrow". The bot replies with what it understood and asks for the time and the venue. The agent sends "11:00" and "Sandton". The bot summarises and asks for a YES. The agent replies YES, and the booking is confirmed with a reference number.

The agent is set as the sales person on the card, so the appointment goes straight into their calendar. Companies without AI actions keep the existing step-by-step flow, unchanged.

Appointments at an office can now carry a region code, such as NE or GN, which is set once on the office and added to every reference automatically. A new Offices screen lets admins add, edit and retire offices without touching anything else.

WhatsApp bookings and replies now appear on the board the moment they happen

Automize boards update live when someone moves a card or changes a deal. But cards that arrived from WhatsApp, whether a client booking a slot or an agent sending in a lead, only showed up after the next automatic refresh, which could take up to a minute.

Now, every WhatsApp path that creates or changes a card pushes the update to everyone watching the board straight away. A new booking appears within seconds. A confirmation, a cancellation, a reschedule, an outcome recorded over WhatsApp, all of these update the board in real time, without anyone pressing refresh.

A cancelled or lost card is removed from the board the same way a manual drag would remove it.

For teams that run their day from the board, this means the picture they are looking at is always current, not a minute behind.

Approval steps now say what a rejection does, and can time out after a set number of minutes

Until now, pressing Reject on an approval step did not necessarily stop the process. The run carried on to the next step regardless, which meant designers had to add a separate decision step to check the answer. Some processes were set up that way on purpose, but many were not, and the difference was invisible.

Approval steps now ask the designer to choose what a rejection does: stop the run, take a specific path, or carry on as before. The button the approver sees says exactly what will happen, for example "Reject, stop the run" or "Reject, takes its rejected path", so there is no guessing.

Steps saved before this change keep carrying on after a rejection, because processes that use a later decision to read the answer rely on that. The process validator points those steps out so designers can review them at their own pace.

Approval steps can also now have a time limit. If nobody answers within the set number of minutes, the run is woken with a timed-out result and the task closes cleanly. No more suspended runs that wait forever.

Opening a step to edit it now runs one query instead of around 300

Every time someone opened a step on the process map to edit it, the platform ran a separate database query for each connector to check whether the company had set it up. On a full connector list that was around 316 queries, every single time.

We replaced all of those with one query that counts all the company's connections at once, the same approach the connector settings page and the action search already used. A test now holds the step-edit form to ten queries or fewer, and fails if that number climbs.

For people who spend time building or adjusting processes, steps open noticeably faster. For everyone else, the platform is doing less work in the background on every edit, which leaves more headroom for the things that matter.

Bots can now read Peppol e-invoices, bank files, saved emails and nine other document formats

Document automation only works if the bot can read what arrives. Suppliers send invoices as Peppol files, a structured electronic format that carries every invoice field in a machine-readable form. Banks export statements as camt.053, OFX or QIF files. Emails arrive as saved message files, each with attachments that need reading too.

This week we added support for all of these, plus spreadsheet files, ZIP archives, web pages, PowerPoint text, and two newer image formats. Every document step, invoices, statements, receipts, credit notes and the rest, can now take any of these formats without any change to the process.

Bank files such as camt.053, OFX and QIF are read exactly, with no AI needed, and the data comes back in the same shape as an MT940 statement. Peppol e-invoices are read directly from the structured file, so a short file that would previously have been sent for optical character recognition is handled correctly from the start.

With UAE e-invoicing becoming mandatory on 1 January 2027, Peppol support means processes built today will handle those files without adjustment.