If you haven’t already, check out how to set up a questionnaire here.  You can also see the different ways of manually sending a questionnaire.

Automations are a great way to save yourself some time by sending clients a quote or questionnaire at a specific time. A good example of this is sending a wedding prep questionnaire one month before the wedding date.

Before we get into the automation, there's a few things we need to make sure we include in the email, to be sure that the questionnaire is attached.

You can make a template here in Settings › Email Templates, that's a Questionnaire Invitation type:

The REALLY important text you need to include in all your emails to which you attach a quote or questionnaire is:

The language can change a bit too and you don’t always have to use the {{item.name}} token. You can use the item link start and end tokens around your own wording, like this for example:

Ok, now that we made sure those tokens are in the email we’re sending, let’s set up the automation.

Our ‘Send email’ action looks like this:

Those item link tokens in our email template will link to the 'reference item' selected, here that's the Pre-Wedding Questionnaire. This is the key with this kind of automation. When you want to attach a new item to a job and have a link sent by automated email, you'll select that item in the 'Reference item for tokens' dropdown. The item link tokens in the email will then become a clickable link to that item.

Remember that you will already have to have your email template and questionnaire created (in Settings › Email Templates and Settings › Questionnaires) to attach them in your automation.

This email is being sent immediately, to the 'Clients' using the email template 'Wedding Prep' and attaching the 'Pre-Wedding Questionnaire'.

When this automation runs here's what it's doing:

That questionnaire will be added to the job and an email sent to the client linking to their questionnaire.

Sending a quote by automation is almost identical to sending a questionnaire. You'll want to be sure you've created a Quote Invitation type email template here in Settings › Email Templates, which contains that 'item link' language, and a Quote Template here in Settings › Quotes to link to.

In the action of your automation you'll link to that email template and that specific quote in the Template and Reference item for tokens dropdowns:

Your automation may have a different observing and different conditions when you're sending out a quote. For example, you may want to send your wedding quote automatically when a new lead is created with your Wedding job type:

In this example above, the automation would run 1 day after a new Wedding lead is created and send out that email to the clients on the job, with a link to their wedding quote.

The process for sending out contracts by automation is very much the same. You'll want to have created a Contract Invitation type template here in Settings › Email Templates, which contains that 'item link' language, and a Contract Template here in Settings › Contracts.

In this example the automation is sending out a Second Photographer contract to the Second Photographer contact on the job: