Managing Automations

Once you've built an automation, you'll manage it from the Automations list page and the individual automation detail view. This page covers everything you need to keep your workflows running smoothly — from first activation through ongoing monitoring and eventual retirement.

Activating an automation

A newly created automation starts in Draft status. No contacts are enrolled until you activate it. To activate a draft automation:

1. Open the automation from the Automations list.
2. Review the trigger and steps shown on the detail page to confirm everything is correctly configured.
3. Click the Activate (play) button at the top of the page.
4. SendBeam checks the account's live-automation limit for your plan. If you are at the limit, it asks you to pause another automation or upgrade.
5. The status badge changes to Active. The automation is now live.

From the moment of activation, SendBeam enrols contacts as the trigger fires. An event trigger (a form submission, a tag, a new contact, a list join, a field change, an API call) runs the first steps straight away; anything time-based — a wait, a date trigger — is picked up by the scheduler, which runs about once a minute.

What activation checks

Activating runs the automation through a pre-flight before switching it on, and refuses with the reasons if it could not do what it says:

• there are steps, and a trigger;
• every email step has something to send — a template that still exists, or its own subject and content;
• every tag, list, form or automation a step or the trigger points at still exists in this workspace;
• waits have a length or a weekday;
• the workspace can send: a verified from-address (or the shared one), sending not paused, allowance left.

Things that will run but may not be what you meant come back as warnings and do not block: a flow with no email step, a step nothing leads to, a step that starts this same automation again.

The same checks run every time you open the automation, so a template deleted after activation shows up as a problem on the page and as a Needs attention badge in the list. If a run fails — a send is refused, a template has gone — the automation records the reason, shows it on its page for seven days, and the workspace admins get one email a day per automation about it. Contacts are not stuck: they continue past the failing step, so the fix is a matter of correcting the cause, not restarting anyone.

Pausing an automation

You can pause an active automation at any time. This is useful when you want to change the workflow, investigate an issue, or suspend sends during a sensitive period.

To pause an active automation:

1. Open the automation and click the Pause button at the top of the page.
2. The status badge changes to Paused.

When an automation is paused:

• No new contacts are enrolled — trigger events that occur while paused are ignored.
• In-progress contacts are held — their steps are not processed while the automation is paused.
• Paused automations do not count towards the plan's live-automation limit.

To resume a paused automation, click Activate again. Held contacts carry on from the step they were at. Any wait that ran out while the automation was paused is treated as finished, so the next step runs on the following processing pass.

Viewing enrolment stats

The automation detail page shows headline numbers and a per-contact table.

The headline numbers are:

• Total Enrolled — the number of runs started since the automation was created.
• Active — contacts who are mid-workflow and have not yet completed or exited.
• Completed — contacts who have reached the end of the steps.

The Enrolled Contacts table lists every run with the contact's name and email, the run's status (active, completed or exited), the current step, when the next action is due, and when they were enrolled. To see the emails an automation has actually sent, open the Log tab under Reports and filter by Automations.

Starting later

When a large number of contacts enrol at once — an import, a list add — the ones beyond your plan's hourly threshold are given start times spread over the next couple of hours instead of all going at the same moment, so a big arrival becomes a steady stream from your domain. The page shows them as Starting later; nothing is dropped and there is nothing to set.

Editing an automation

Click Edit on the detail page to open the builder. You can change the name, description, trigger and steps whether the automation is a draft, active or paused. Pausing first is still a good habit when you are restructuring a live sequence.

1. Pause the automation if contacts are mid-sequence and the change is significant.
2. Make your changes in the builder — update step settings, reorder steps, swap templates, or adjust wait durations — and save.
3. Click Activate to resume the automation with the updated configuration.

Changes take effect for contacts from the point they reach each step — they do not retroactively affect steps already completed. For example, if you update the template on a Send Email step, contacts who have already passed that step received the old template. Only contacts who reach that step after the update will receive the new version.

Deleting automations

Deleting an automation is a permanent action that cannot be undone. The automation, its steps and its enrolments are removed.

To delete an automation:

1. Pause it first so nothing is mid-flight, and check the Enrolled Contacts table.
2. Open the automation and click Delete at the top of the page.
3. Confirm. The automation, its steps and every enrolment are removed immediately.

From your own code, DELETE /api/v1/automations/{id} does the same (an API key with automations:write, on any plan).

Contacts who were enrolled in a deleted automation are not affected — they remain in your contacts database. Tags applied by the automation remain on the contact unless you remove them.