How to Automate Jotform

A busy Jotform account holds a form for every small process

A purchase request filled in on a Jotform at nine on Monday can still be waiting for its second approver on Friday, while nobody orders the part. Leave requests, incident reports, patient intake and volunteer sign-ups run through Jotform the same way, each on its own form.

Submissions land in Jotform Tables, a database with table, card, calendar and report views. Jotform Workflows moves a submission through approvals and assigned tasks. Jotform Sign collects e-signatures, and payments run through processors such as Stripe, PayPal and Square.

The forms belong to different teams, but the account usually has one keeper, often the office or operations manager, who ends up answering for all of them. Some of the forms were built by colleagues who have since left.

Approval flows stall on the one person who has not clicked

A leave request waits because the manager is on holiday and the request has nowhere else to go. A purchase approval sits at step two of three while the requester asks in the corridor where it has got to. The office manager opens each flow in turn to see who is holding it, then sends reminders by hand.

The forms need watching as well. An embed breaks during a website update, and the contact form collects nothing for a week before anyone notices. A busy form reaches the plan's monthly submission limit halfway through the month. The office manager files the PDF generated from each submission in the right client folder, and someone retypes the submissions meant for the HR system or the patient record, because that system is not among the integrations. Each Friday someone exports the week's submissions to a spreadsheet for the finance lead, who never opens Jotform.

Jotform Workflows moves a request along but cannot see why it stopped

Jotform Workflows starts with each submission and routes it through individual or group approvals, conditional rules and assigned tasks, with reminders and email notifications for anything pending. The Jotform Sign Inbox can send reminder emails for signatures still outstanding.

Action Buttons in Jotform Tables send data to other software and create PDFs. More than 200 integrations push submissions to tools such as Google Sheets, HubSpot, Dropbox and Slack. Each plan caps monthly submissions and active forms, 100 and 5 on Starter, and Jotform sends a warning as a limit comes close.

A workflow knows that step two is waiting, and it can email the approver again. It does not know that the approver is on leave this week, or who covers for them. Nothing in the account compares forty forms' submission counts to show which one went quiet after the website changed, and an integration exists only for the systems Jotform has built one for.

The office manager can see each morning which requests and forms have stalled

Each morning a Trello card appears for every approval that has waited more than two days, naming who holds it and for how long, and the office manager sends the WhatsApp nudge drafted for that approver. For a request stuck behind someone on leave, the card names the person covering, taken from the HR system. Signatures outstanding in Jotform Sign for more than a week go on the same board.

On Monday the team's Microsoft Teams channel gets a health report listing each form with no submissions that week, any form switched off, and any close to its monthly limit. A broken embed on the contact page shows up in the first Monday report after the website change.

HR sees an approved leave request already entered in the HR system, and each generated PDF sits in the right client folder. When a supplier or a partner sends a Jotform of their own, the office manager checks and submits a copy already completed from the data on file.

Only an approver clicks Approve in a Jotform workflow

What the keeper hands over is the daily pass through the approval queue, the form list and the night's submissions.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. Your Jotform account is where each morning's pass starts, and from the queue and the form list the agent carries each submission into the system it belongs in.

Nudges stay drafts, Approve is an approver's click, and the office manager checks anything the agent would submit to someone else's form before it goes. Below, the approval chase posts to Trello and WhatsApp, and the form health check reports to Microsoft Teams.