I’m really happy and excited to launch the ability to perform actions on related data in Flow. This was one of our most requested features and we’ve been working away building all the relevant data relationships to make this possible.
While it has taken a lot of effort to bring it to life, it unlocks a whole new level of use cases for Flow and I’m looking forward to seeing how our users leverage this to automate their businesses.
What do we mean by related data?
The best way to explain this is with an example. Let’s say we are working with transactions. Transactions contain a data field which tells us the customer ID for that transaction, but the transaction does not contain any other data about the customer such as their name or email address.
All of that information is stored in the customer data type. So a customer is a related data type for a transaction. The same goes for products, devices, locations and so on.
What’s new?
Flow has always been able to filter by related data. So for example, you could always filter transactions by customers whose surname was Smith.
The big update is that we are now also able to perform actions on related data. This unlocks a whole new level of use cases within Flow and will allow you to create some really powerful flows.
Data exports become more powerful now as you can flatten the data, no need for multiple exports and spreadsheets. For example, on the transactions export, you could previously only export the customer ID. Now, you can join on the customer data such as name, email, address, points balance, credit balance, address etc so you can have all the customer data in one row alongside the transaction data.
Data updates and deletes are now also enhanced as you can fetch data of one type, and perform actions on any related data type. For example, by fetching transactions and filtering them as needed, you can then take action on the related customer, device, staff member and more.
What does it allow me to do?
Here’s an example of some flows that are now possible to give you a flavour:
⭐ Export a list of all customers who have bought from me in the last 3 months.
Use filters to make this even more targeted, for example filtering by customers who have only purchased a product from selected categories/brands/suppliers or from a particular location. This is ideal for producing customer lists for targeted email/mail marketing.
⭐ Untick sell on till for all out of stock products
When a product is out of stock, hide it from the till and add a prefix to the product name. Do the opposite when the item is back in stock.
⭐ Change the customer type for high value customers
Set a specific customer type for customers who have spent more than £100 in a single order. Add additional filters to filter by location, products, staff and more.
We’re now working on adding new templates to showcase the most common use cases so keep an eye out on our templates page.
If you would like to discuss this feature in more detail with us, drop us an email or book in a call and we can go through what you are trying to achieve and even help you get the Flow setup.
