Workflows
Workflows are multi-step automations that run inside Housecat. A workflow is checkpointed at every step: it can retry on failure, sleep, wait for an approval, and pick up exactly where it left off if the system restarts mid-run. They’re how Housecat runs business logic that has to be reliable, not just best-effort.
- User
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Build a workflow to sync forwarded emails with our Notion CRM.
- Housecat
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Building a workflow with these steps: save attachemnts, analyze email and attachments, update CRM, send email summary.
How Workflows Run
Every workflow moves through a series of steps, and the result of each step is saved. If a later step fails — a flaky API, a timeout, a deploy — the workflow resumes from the last good checkpoint instead of starting over or doing the work twice. Steps can also suspend the run entirely: a workflow can sleep until a wall-clock time, or wait for an external event like a Slack approval before continuing.
The Workflows page lists every run with the overall workflow input and output, real-time progress of every step and status and inputs and outputs. Approval steps let you see exactly what a run is waiting on.
Triggers
A workflow starts from a trigger declared in its config:
- Email — an inbound email to a configured address kicks off the run, passing the sender, subject, body, and any attachments.
- Slack — a Slack message shortcut (for example “Save to CRM”) dispatches the workflow with the source message.
- Schedule — run on a cron schedule like any other job.
Settings
Workflows expose operator-tunable settings — prompt text, model choice, Notion database IDs and field mappings, feature flags — that you can change without touching code. Settings are saved per user, so your configuration sticks across runs. A dry-run mode runs every analysis and diff step end to end but suppresses external writes, so you can preview exactly what a workflow would do before it touches your CRM or sends a reply.
The Email-CRM Workflow
The flagship workflow turns your inbox into a CRM pipeline. Forward or BCC a deal email to your CRM address and the workflow:
- Reads the email — and downloads any attached PDF (including DocSend decks) so companies and people mentioned only in the slides are picked up.
- Extracts companies and contacts and diffs them against your existing records.
- Writes the changes to your CRM and, when connected, syncs them to Notion.
- Sends you a threaded reply summarizing what was saved, with a link to the deck.
Re-processing the same email is safe — it won’t create duplicates — and decks and attachments persist on the matched company.
Authoring Custom Workflows
The AI coding agent can build workflows by forking existing examples and modifying. A workflows playground lets you test workflows with example data before going live.
Use Cases
Dig into specific use cases: