We spend a lot of time talking about automation in abstract terms: what it enables, who it is for, why plain-English input matters. This article is more concrete. Here are five automations that come up again and again among the ops teams we work with — the ones that consistently deliver time savings, reduce errors, and get adopted quickly because they target processes that are genuinely painful.
For each one, we have included a starting description you can take into Agenno and adapt. These are not magic strings — you will need to adjust the app names, column labels, and notification recipients to match your setup. But they are real descriptions of real workflows, not generalised abstractions.
A note before we start: we are not saying every ops team should automate these five things before anything else. If you have a different process that is causing more friction — automate that one first. The right automation to start with is the one that is annoying you most right now. These five just happen to be broadly applicable.
1. New hire onboarding task creation
When a new person joins, there is a set of things that always needs to happen: IT access requests, tool invitations, calendar setup, introductory meeting bookings. Most ops teams manage this with a checklist, which means the checklist gets followed inconsistently and items get missed under time pressure.
The automation that works here is triggered when a new row appears in your HR tracking sheet (or when a new employee record is created in your HRIS, if you use one), and creates tasks across the relevant systems automatically.
Starting description to adapt:
"When a new row is added to the New Starters tab of our HR spreadsheet, create a task in Asana in the Onboarding project with the title 'IT setup: [name from column A]' assigned to the IT contact in column F. Also send an email to the manager in column C with a link to our onboarding checklist document. Post a Slack message to #team-ops with the new starter's name and start date from column B."
The time saving here is not just the minutes saved creating each task — it is the cognitive overhead of remembering that these tasks need to exist at all, and the errors that happen when they are forgotten under pressure.
2. Weekly status report email
Most ops teams send some version of a weekly status report: who did what, what is outstanding, what changed. If this is built from a manual process of checking multiple systems and writing a summary email, it takes anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours every Friday afternoon — time that could be spent on anything else.
The automation runs on a schedule (every Friday at 4 PM, say) and pulls data from whatever sources your status report draws on, then sends the compiled report to a distribution list.
Starting description:
"Every Friday at 4:00 PM, look at the Status column of the Active Projects tab in our Operations spreadsheet and collect all rows where Status is 'In Progress' or 'Blocked'. Send an email to [email protected] with the subject 'Weekly Ops Status — [date]' listing those projects and their current status. Include the owner name from column D and the expected completion date from column E for each project."
You will need to make this specific to your actual data structure. The principle is: your status report already exists as data somewhere — the automation reads that data and formats it into an email, so you do not have to do that manually every week.
3. Form submission to CRM and notification
Contact form submissions, demo requests, event registrations — any inbound enquiry that should result in a record being created somewhere and someone being notified. This is probably the single most common automation starting point for ops teams, because the manual version (checking a form inbox, copy-pasting details into a CRM, emailing the relevant person) is almost pure busywork.
Starting description:
"When someone submits the Contact Us form on our website, create a new contact record in our CRM with their name, email, company, and message from the form. Set the lead source to 'Website'. Then send an email to [email protected] with the subject 'New website enquiry: [company name]' and include all the form details in the body. Post a Slack message to #sales-leads with the same information."
The integration point here depends on your form provider and CRM. Agenno supports Typeform, Tally, Google Forms, and several others on the input side, and most common CRMs on the output side. The description stays the same regardless of which combination you are using — the integration layer handles the specifics.
4. Invoice received to approval workflow
Finance teams and ops managers who handle supplier invoices know the manual loop well: invoice arrives by email, someone copies the details into a tracking spreadsheet, someone else is notified for approval, approval confirmation is sent back, invoice is moved to a "ready for payment" queue. Each hand-off is a potential delay or dropped item.
Starting description:
"When an email arrives in [email protected] with the subject containing 'Invoice', extract the sender name and email, the invoice amount if mentioned in the subject or body, and the date. Add a row to the Invoice Tracker spreadsheet with this information and set the Status column to 'Pending Approval'. Send an email to the finance manager at [email protected] with the subject 'Invoice pending approval: [sender name]' and include the original email details."
This one benefits from some refinement after the first few runs. Invoice emails are not standardised, so the amount extraction may be inconsistent depending on how suppliers format their emails. Starting with the notification and spreadsheet row is a reasonable first step; the amount extraction can be added once you have seen a sample of what your actual invoices look like.
5. Customer milestone notification
If you track customer activity in any form — onboarding milestones, renewal dates, trial expiry — there is almost certainly a set of notifications that should fire automatically at specific points. The manual version is either a calendar reminder system that requires constant maintenance, or someone on the team periodically reviewing a spreadsheet to check for upcoming dates.
Starting description:
"Every Monday morning at 9 AM, check the Renewals tab of our Customer spreadsheet. For any row where the Renewal Date column is within 30 days of today and the Status column is not 'Renewed', send an email to the account owner in column F with the subject 'Renewal due: [customer name]' and include the renewal date and the customer's contract value from the spreadsheet. Also add a task in Asana to the Account Management project assigned to that owner."
The specific trigger window (30 days here) and the action set will vary based on your process. Some teams send a second alert at 14 days. Some also notify the customer directly, not just the account owner. These are additional automations that layer on top of the first one rather than all being described in a single, complex flow.
A note on starting simple
Each of the descriptions above is a starting point, not a finished automation. The right way to build these is to activate a simple version first, watch it run on a few real events, and then add complexity (error handling, conditional branches, secondary notifications) based on what you actually observe rather than what you think you might need.
This is not a limitation of the platform — it is good automation practice regardless of which tool you are using. Automations that try to handle every edge case from day one are harder to debug when something goes wrong. Automations that start simple and grow incrementally are easier to understand, easier to maintain, and more likely to actually stay running long-term.
All five of these automations have templates in the Agenno library if you want a pre-configured starting point. The templates use placeholder values you replace with your own, which is often faster than writing a description from scratch if you are new to the platform.