A suite of organization & productivity tools for businesses

Google Workspace

Client onboarding can be a time-consuming process that many client-based businesses have to deal with on a regular basis. If done right, it can be a good start to a long & healthy relationship with your new client, but when not done properly, it can make your team unproductive and can ruin your first impression with your customer.

In this guide, I'm going to show you how you can set up a great onboarding process that is simple to follow, highly customizable & completely automated. We'll be using some of the most commonly used tools for managing modern digital companies like 

 & many more. Let's get started right away!

In order to build any good process automation, you first need to think about what you actually want to achieve with your automation. In the case of an onboarding process, we mainly want to complete lots of organizational tasks, like:

Make sure that you know what you want to include in your onboarding process, before moving forward with this guide.

Now let's get started with setting up the onboarding process. The first thing we have to do is to create an onboarding form. This form will be the trigger for our onboarding process. It's where our client will be entering their information and where we can ask questions based on our individual onboarding process. Later, we'll use that information in our automation workflows, so be sure not to skip this step.

 which is an easy-to-use and powerful form building platform. It's great for our onboarding automation, because it allows you to ask your client all types of questions easily and it's very well integrated with automation tools like Zapier.

Now inside of Typeform, we'll create a new form for our onboarding process. Here you can add all the questions you'd like to ask your new clients. 

 a really simple version of what this could look like. Obviously, you can add everything that makes sense to you here. Just keep in mind that this will be one of the first touchpoints that your client has with your company, so try to make it easy & somewhat quick to fill out.

Once you've finished setting up the form, go through a test run so that you actually have a real example of the data that your client will enter in the form. This will help us with the Zapier automation.

Now that you've got a example form entry ready, we can get started with the actual automation. To do that, head over to 

Again, if you're not yet familiar with Zapier feel free to watch my 

. If you want to learn more about all the possibilities that Zapier gives you, take a look at my 

Ok, so let's set up the trigger for our automation now:

 Create a new zap, then search for Typeform and choose the Typeform app as your trigger. 

 For the trigger event, choose the "New Entry" trigger event.

 Next, choose the Typeform account that you want to connect with this automation. If you've never connected your Typeform to Zapier, you will first have to authenticate the account.

 Choose the form that you created inside of Typeform. This let's Zapier know which form to trigger the automation for.

 Now it's time to test if the automation triggers correctly. To do that, just click on the "Test trigger" button.

⁠If Zapier is able to get data from the trigger successfully, it means we're now ready to automate tasks in your onboarding process!

The first thing we'll automate is creating a project in our team task management application. In my case that's 

. First, we'll create a project in Todoist and then in the next step we'll add in employees and external collaborators.

 Go back to your Zapier automation and add a new step to the automation. Choose Todoist as the app.

Next, choose "Create Project" as the event.

 Again connect you're Todoist account if you haven't connected it yet.

 Now we'll have to set up the first actual automation step. We have to define set up the name of the project we want to create. Obviously, this should not be the same everytime. Instead, we want this to be set based on information our client entered into our onboarding form.

To achieve this, click on the "Name" field and look for the field "Company name" in the dropdown list. This will of course only work if you've set up a field for the company name in your Typeform automation before.

: Just as before, you'll have to test your action to see if it works. This time, we can actually check if it worked by going to our Todoist account and checking if the project has been successfully created. In my case, it worked!

Right now, you're the only person that has access to the newly created project, but if you're working with a team, you'll likely want to add your team members to the project as well. Let's set this up inside of Zapier as well.

 Create an additional action step and choose Todoist again.

 Then choose the action, “Invite a user to project in Todoist”.

In order for Zapier to know which project the users should be added to, you need to specify it in the "Project" field. To do that, go to the "Custom" tab and then choose the ID that was generated in the previous step.

Enter the email addresess of the people you want to invite into the field. This adds the user to the project in Todoist. Just make sure, that you're using the same email addresses that your team members are registered with in Todoist.

 as well. Clockify is an easy-to-use time-tracking solution that you can use to log hours for your clients in a simple way. In this step, we'll create set up the client so that your team can just logging hours immediately.

 Add a new automation step and choose Clockify as the app.

 As the event, choose the "Create client" option.

Create the client in Clockify. For the "Workspace" you can just use your default workspace. For the client name, we'll again get the data from the Typeform response. You'll need to add a field for the client name in your onboarding form for this to work if you haven't done that already.

 That’s it! Now you can check the Clockify app to see if the client has been added.

Now, repeat this step following the same steps to create a project for that client as well. To tell Zapier which client you want to add the project for, use the project ID like we did it for the Todoist step.

As we also want to communicate with our client, let's create a joint 

: Add a new automation step and choose Slack as the app. (You see how this process is pretty similar).

 As the event, choose the "Create a channel" option.

 Choose your Slack account and enter the channel name. You can use the 

In order to add users to your Slack channel, we'll have to create an additional automation step.

 Add a new automation step and choose Slack as the app.

 Choose your Slack account, the previous ID, and the Slack channel that you used. Then add the users (you can add multiple).

Next, we'll create a folder structure in Google Drive. This will save you time instead of manually doing it.

 Add a new automation step and choose Google Drive as the app and choose "Create folder" as the action. 

 Choose your account and set up the action. The folder name should be the “business name”. For the Drive, you can choose your Google Drive.

 Lastly, use the name of your project as the name of the Drive folder.

To add more subfolders, just repeat this procedure and use the ID of the parent folder in the parent folder field.

We can't automate everything perfectly, so we'll have to do some manual work to complement our automation. Also, we want to have an internal strategy call for every new client to get all employees on board. To rememember this for every client, we'll set up a reminder in Zapier

To do that, add a new automation step using the Todoist app, choose your account, and choose "Create Task" as the action. As the name of this tasks, write down the manual tasks that need to be done in order to complete the onboarding process. This could be scheduling the internal call, requesting login credentials from the client or anything else.

After you're done, assign this task to one of your team members, so there's a clear responsibility for this task. Also don't forget to test!

That's it! We've finished the onboarding process. Again, this guide only shows one of millions of ways to set up a process like this. You can get way more advanced than this, with more complex forms that clients fill out, where they upload documents, watch an onboarding video series, or get added to your client email list. Also, it doesn't matter which tools you use and which things you include. In the end, it just has to make sense for you and your business.

Hope you enjoyed this guide. See you next time :)

Learn how to create a complete client onboarding process for your business with Zapier

Create an onboarding process with Zapier

Emails are an important everyday communication tool we encounter more often than not in this digital age. We spend a considerable amount of time writing, reading, sending, and replying to emails. 

One of the most widely used email services is 

 by Google. In this article, I will show you how to save time, organize, and sort your emails to increase productivity by the use of Gmail Filters.

Filters can be considered as doors, where the condition set; 

 act as a key to the door. Once an email meets certain criteria, it opens the door that leads to the execution of the set instructions or automation as defined in the filter criteria.

The fascinating thing about filters used in Gmail is that they come in handy and are very easy to set up as you will see. 

One of the easiest and most commonly used filter options is the use of the Gmail search bar. The process of searching for an email in your mailbox by use of the Gmail Search bar is the most basic filter we use.

Example: Filter for mails from Marie Poulin

Let’s take the example that you want to check for 

 newsletter emails, by simply inputting the names on the search bar, you will see all the emails sent or received from her.

This makes it easier to locate the specific email you want. Even if it was sent a year ago, you can search and get it. Isn’t that amazing? Maybe you want to get some tips that were shared a while ago. In a brink of a second, you will have everything that you need.

In this, we are applying automation to the emails if they met the specific criteria.  We have automatically filtered for all mails from Marie Poulin

The filter selection allows you to filter a specific email address, subject lines, certain words, emails of a certain size, specific timeframe, and attachments. Just try out all the options to filter for exactly the emails that you want.

The Gmail search bar comes with advanced search options which give you more criteria that you can use to search and filter through your email. 

 from the Gmail search bar, click on the button at the right-hand end of the search bar. A drop-down menu will appear with additional criteria you can use to enhance your search. Let us go through what each of the options on the dropdown menu means:

 This option is used to filter out an email sent from a specific email address.

 It is used to filter out an email you sent out to a specific email address 

 It is used to filter out an email that has the specific subject indicated.

: It is used to filter out an email with the specific keywords indicated

: The option is used to filter out emails that don't contain specific words

 It is used to filter out emails that are within the size criteria specified

: It is used to filter out emails within the specific timeframe

 It is used to specify the folders in the Mailbox you want to search/filter through.

The dropdown search menu also offers the option to filter out emails with attachments, or with chats - if needed, by clicking on the checkbox.

As simple as that, you can use the various options to make your mailbox functions easier. Your use of Gmail will become much easier than you have ever imagined!

Now that you've filtered for the right mails, it's time to tell Gmail what to do when receiving a new mail matching our conditions. To do that, click on the 

A dropdown option will appear with several filter criteria; let us go through each of them to understand their use and application.

 Enabling this option will make any mail matching the conditions skip the inbox. Really useful for mails that are annoying & not important to you. Also great, if you want to categorize your mail before reading it.

  This option will mark the email as read. Great for mails that aren't important, as it reduces the stress of having thousands of unopened emails.

: This option will star the message and the email will appear in the Starred Message Folder. Great for important emails that you want to keep as "Starred".

 This option is very useful when it comes to organizing and categorizing your emails. This menu option allows you to create labels of your choice and once an email meets the criteria set for the label, the email will be sent to the specific folder. 

you can have a newsletter label for all the newsletter emails you receive.

: this option will automatically forward the email to the forwarding email addresses defined within this option.

 – This option will automatically delete the email set in the criteria once received. While using this option, be careful not to apply to important email. (Personally, I think it's not great to use this option. Archive mails that you think are not important instead of deleting them directly)

 – There are times when emails that are not spam are occasionally sent to the spam folder. You can use this option for emails you are sure are not spam.

: This option allows you to automatically reply to the email using a pre-set email template/message.

 This option allows you to automatically mark, or never mark, the emails as important.

 This option allows you to categorize an email in the pre-set categories e.g. primary, social, etc.

Also, apply filter to other matching conversations

: This option allows you to apply the filter rules set out to other emails that match the criteria. 

After selecting the filter options that suit your needs, click create filter, and congratulations, you have set up your first Gmail filter! Your emails will now appear as per the filter criteria you set out.

There's also another way to set up filters that's great if you want to create a filter as you read an email.

 Click on the more option, (three dots on the far right of the email) 

 Once done with that, click on the “Filter messages like this” option.

Upon doing this, Gmail will filter through your mailbox and bring up emails similar to the one selected. The same drop-down menu similar to that of the Advanced Search bar option will appear. You can now refine your filters to find what you are looking for and apply as shown above.

Filters can come in handy in organizing, automating, and enhancing overall productivity by saving time while using your Gmail.

#1: Organizing Emails and Pre-applying Labels.

You can use the filter options to automatically move emails to specific categories, folders, and labels based on your preference. This means you know exactly where to look for specific emails, saving time while remaining organized.

You can also organize emails based on tags, which can allow you to have a separate space in your Gmail account. Hence, no more distraction while doing your normal work. Now, you can just check for specific emails during your preferred time. Even if you want once a week, it's all up to you!

Not only can you do that for emails, but also specific documents like invoices or receipts. You can keep track of all your transactions in one place. Again, an absolute time saver!

#2: Filtering Out Spam or Unnecessary Emails.

Filters also come in handy in sorting out spam, as well as emails that you feel are not important and most probably will not read anyway. By applying filters, you can automatically send such emails straight to the “Not Important” folder. 

You can now say goodbye to the automated messages from your social media that you feel should not appear in your inbox.

One very useful advanced use case for filters is to send out automated replies using the pre-set email templates for incoming mail that meets the set criteria. 

You can think of the many scenarios where this option can come in handy, and apply it accordingly. For example, sending automated emails while on vacation.

However, ensure your filter criteria are set up correctly, to avoid sending out the wrong templates to the wrong recipient.

Get to inbox zero by setting up Gmail filters. Learn how to automatically label & categorize your email in 5 minutes.