The follow-ups your office means to do, done every time.

Most service offices already know their follow-up rules. Call new leads within 15 minutes. Text after a visit. Chase the estimate on day three. Call the member before renewal. The rules aren't the problem; doing them every single time on a busy Tuesday is. TradesWork automations turn those rules into When / If / Then lines you can test on real data, approve run by run, and audit afterwards.

The model: When, If, Then

When is the trigger. Fourteen fire on events as they happen. Four are checked daily against a number of days you choose, and can be limited to one weekday and a start hour in your time zone.

If is a list of conditions, and all of them must be met. The 10 fields are business unit, job type, job priority (Low to Emergency), customer type (residential or commercial), customer tag, job tag, amount (estimate, invoice balance or payment), review rating, lead source, and whether the customer has an active membership. With no conditions, it runs every time.

Then is up to six actions, run in order:

• Text the customer: up to 600 characters. Quiet hours and STOP are respected.
• Email the customer: subject and message. Every email ends with a line inviting the customer to reply if they'd rather not get them.
• Create an office task: assigned to a person or a role, with a priority and a due time from 0 to 1,440 hours out.
• Add a tag to the customer or the job.
• Plan a follow-up: a call, text or visit 0 to 365 days out, on the Follow Up board.
• Notify someone inside TradesWork.
• Send to a webhook: HTTPS only, signed, with ids and amounts but never names, phones or emails.

Messages can use placeholders such as {{first_name}}, {{invoice_number}}, {{amount}} and {{link}}. If a value is missing, it's left out, never made up.

The 19 templates

Every template that texts or emails a customer starts in Ask first. The rest start in Run automatically, because a task or a tag is easy to undo. All of them install switched off.

app.tradeswork.app · Estimate follow-up board with pipeline totals

TradesWork also suggests automations from what your office already does by hand. It looks at the last 60 days for five patterns, such as staff texting customers about open estimates or overdue invoices, or creating tasks after low reviews. These are simple counts, not an AI model, and a suggestion is never installed for you.

Ask first, then automatic

The hardest part of automating customer messages isn't building the rule. It's trusting it. So customer-facing automations start in Ask first (runs wait in Approvals): each run sits in Approvals with the exact text and recipient, and someone approves or rejects it.

1. 1

   Install and test

   Test against a real event from the last 30 days. Read what it would have sent.

2. 2

   Turn on in Ask first

   Each run waits in Approvals. Reject anything that reads wrong and tighten the conditions.

3. 3

   Watch the count

   After 10 approved runs with none rejected, the Trust panel says you can let it run automatically.

4. 4

   Switch, or don't

   Click Run automatically, or keep approving. You can go back with Ask first again at any time.

Setting the Automations mode to Off in AI settings pauses Ask-first runs across the board, which is a handy brake during a holiday shutdown.

Quiet hours and opt-outs

Texts never go out during quiet hours, 9 pm to 8 am in your company's time zone by default. A text that would land then is queued for when quiet hours end, and the step says so.

A customer who replied STOP isn't texted, and that's checked again at send time, so a STOP that arrives while a text is queued still wins. Emails skip addresses on the automation opt-out list and customers flagged Do Not Mail. In every case, the run shows the step as Not sent with the reason. A blocked message is never reported as a success.

Test runs and run history

Test works even while an automation is off. It takes the most recent matching event, checks each condition, and lists what each action would do: "Would text…", "Wouldn't be sent" with the reason, or "Would POST…". Nothing is sent or changed, and the test is logged as a Test run.

Run history shows When, Automation, Event, Result and Why for every run. Results are Succeeded, Partly done, Failed, Skipped, Waiting for approval, Rejected or Test run. Open a run and you see each condition marked Met or Not met and each step marked Done, Failed, Not sent, Skipped or Planned, with links to the job, customer, lead or approval. Skipped runs are hidden until you click Show skipped, so the list stays readable.

Limits that protect you

Automations check for new events every 5 minutes, and Run now checks immediately.

Permissions

Only owners and admins can build, install, edit, test, switch on or off, or delete automations. Dispatchers, CSRs, accounting and read-only viewers can see automations and run history; viewers get no controls at all. Turning on, turning off, changing mode, installing, deleting and testing are all recorded in the audit trail.

Where automations aren't the right tool

If you want a long drip campaign with waits between steps, branching, or A/B tests, this isn't built for it: there's no wait step and no OR logic. Marketing email to your whole list belongs in an email tool. And automations won't fix a process nobody agreed on; write the rule down with your team first, then automate it.

ServiceTitan has added a self-serve Automations screen, with templates that install switched off and a run history. Its Release Hub lists it as Early Access for roofing and exteriors customers only, and says ServiceTitan previously set up and managed automations for you.¹