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Hello and welcome to our latest Flows of the Week! This time, we are diving into how Flows can help you to calculate the cost of your meetings so that you can make better-informed decisions about how to allocate your resources.
Meeting management
Whilst very important and a large part of our weekly work schedule, meetings can carry a heavy price tag regarding time, resources, and can result in a loss in productivity. Achieving a balance between effective communication and the potential cost implications of excessive meetings is crucial for maintaining streamlined workflows.But where do you start? Well, this is where Flows comes into play. Our automation tech simplifies the process and enhances your ability to comprehend the costs associated with meetings and their Return on Investment (ROI) by using actions such as API calls, variable management, and notifications. Flows empowers you to accurately calculate expenses, assess the impact of meetings, and make informed decisions on resource allocation. This automation does not just streamline operations. It provides a valuable tool for optimising the efficiency and effectiveness of your business strategies.
The foundation: meeting settlement
In the example below, we focus on creating a flow that springs to life when a meeting is scheduled. We focus on Flows capabilities to go through a range of tasks, including making API calls and managing variables, all with the assistance of our AI tool: FLO. Where you text your instructions to FLO and it starts to create the workflow.
When a meeting is successfully set in your calendar, Flows awakens. Its first task is to initiate an API call, fetching attendees from their email addresses. Not just that, it dives deeper, gathering attendee details like salaries and the meeting’s duration.
Enter the stage: a manual “For each” and “Increment number.”
In this case, we have to introduce some manual intervention. Here, a “For Each” stage steps in, going through the invitees. The goal? To ascertain who’s on the list, with an incremental number assigned to each participant, Flows uses the salary info collected earlier.
Calculations with purpose
Moving forward, Flows combines the salaries of all attendees, creating a set of data ready to be used. For this, total_salary has a value of 0 initially but then it keeps increasing with the sum of all the attendee’s salaries.
The Calculation
A pivotal moment comes as Flows crafts a new variable—a result of the meeting’s duration (in hours) multiplied by the sum of the salaries.
Noteworthy notifications
Now, the stage is set for a dual notification: one for Slack and email, cascading to HR/management. If the meeting’s cost breaches $2,500, a special notification is sent to HR. If the meeting host occupies the upper echelons of management, the unique approval process is bypassed.
The Finale: Sending the data to Google Sheets
The flow captures the meeting’s cost and places it into a Google Sheet. This data is destined for reporting, where insights combine to enrich future strategies.
And there you have it – a seamless journey through the mechanics of calculating the cost of meetings with Flows. As businesses, it’s paramount we ensure our time is not only well-spent but also translates to tangible value. This balance between human intervention and the prowess of AI underscores the immense potential of Flows and FLO, moving beyond mere automation to strategic business decisions. As we continually evolve and refine our technology, our primary mission remains: equipping you with tools that genuinely impact and elevate your operational dynamics.
Stay tuned for more insights and updates in our next Flow of the Week! If you want to learn more about how flows can help you accelerate delivery and supercharge your innovation, get in touch.