Payaca automations now fire the moment a document is signed, and task templates carry a default assignee and deadline. How UK installers chain signatures, stage moves and pre-assigned tasks into one workflow.
Jamie Duncan
A customer signs their contract at 8pm on a Tuesday. On a good week, someone spots it the next morning, sends the confirmation, raises the deposit invoice, and asks whoever owns grid applications to start the DNO paperwork. On a busy week, the signature sits unnoticed until Thursday, and the three-day head start you could have had on the DNO queue is gone.
The gap between "customer signed" and "work started" is pure admin, and it's the same admin on every job. Two Payaca releases this month close it: document signatures can now trigger automations, and tasks created from templates arrive already assigned, with a deadline attached.
If you'd rather see this running on your own workflows than read about it, book a demo and we'll build one live.
Payaca's automations have been able to react to proposals, invoices, projects and scheduled events for a long time. What they couldn't see was the paperwork itself. A signed contract, commissioning form or handover document just sat there until a person opened it.
Documents are now an automation type of their own, with a signature trigger. The moment a signature lands, an automation can send an email or SMS using the standard project and customer recipient options, move the project to a different pipeline stage, add a tag, or create a task on the project.
The second change is to task templates. A template can now carry an assignee and a deadline offset in days. Any task created from it - by hand, or by an automation - shows up assigned to the right person with its deadline already set from the moment it was created. The assignee doesn't have to be a named individual either. Set it to the project owner and it resolves against whichever project fired the automation, so one template serves every crew and every job.
Together they turn the quiet stretch after a signature into the busiest part of the pipeline.
Here's the sequence most UK clean tech installers want, and how to wire it.
The automation. In Automations, create a custom automation on documents with the signature trigger. Add three actions:
The task template. This is where the new fields earn their keep. On the template, set the assignee to the project owner and the deadline offset to three days. Now every signed contract produces a DNO application task that belongs to someone specific, with a date on it, three days out. Whoever runs your admin no longer creates it, assigns it or dates it. They just see it appear on the right person's list.
The chain. Stage moves are themselves automation triggers, so the sequence doesn't stop at one task. When the signature moves the project to "Pre-install", a second automation on that stage change can create the rest of the pre-install pack: book the survey, order long-lead materials, notify the scaffolder. Each of those tasks comes from its own template, so each arrives assigned and dated too. One signature, and the whole front end of the job is in motion.
If you'd rather not build the rules by hand, ask Dave, the assistant built into Payaca, to set them up from a plain-English description (on plans that include Dave), then open the automation to check the trigger and actions match what you meant before switching it on.
An unassigned task belongs to nobody, and an undated task is never late. Those are the tasks that slip. Nobody decides to skip them - "who does this" and "by when" were simply the two fields someone had to fill in by hand every single time, and at 20 or 30 installs a month they're exactly the fields that get left blank when it's busy.
For MCS businesses the stakes are higher than tidiness. The DNO application, the commissioning record, the handover pack - each is a compliance step with a real owner and a real clock, and each one missed is a job that can't close out. Templates with assignees and deadlines mean the compliance chain builds itself the same way on every job, which is also what you want to be able to show when an audit asks how your process works.
One honest caveat: tasks are assigned by default, not guaranteed. If the project that fired the automation has no owner for the template to resolve against, the task is still created - it just arrives unassigned rather than the automation failing. Worth keeping project ownership tidy for that reason alone.
You don't need dozens of automations to feel the difference. Most installers get the value from:
Write task names as actions ("Submit G99 application to DNO", not "G99 application") and keep a separate task template per job type - solar PV, battery, heat pump - so the right sequence fires for the right work.
The aim is a workflow where people make the decisions that need judgement - pricing the job, signing off the design - and everything between those decisions moves on its own. Signatures were the last stretch of the job where that wasn't true. Now the paperwork can do the chasing. If you want to see how much of your current admin this removes, book a 30-minute demo and bring your own job types.
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