There’s a ton you can do with Rocketadmin. 

You can add, edit, and orchestrate information — anything a good database manager should have.

Taking your data in bold new directions, however, is just as easy.

Outside of integrating with something like Zapier, we offer three distinct ways to take your data even further.

These are:

• Automations
• UI Widgets
• AI Insights

Today, we wanted to take a look at Automations, going through how they work and what they can be used for, as well as offering a few use cases that should get you up and running.

What are Automations in Rocketadmin?

“Automations” simply refers to workflows you can set up in your tables. These work in two ways:

• Basic action — adding, deleting, or updating a row can immediately trigger an action of some kind.
• Custom action — as an extension to basic actions, you can create a clickable button that’s based on logic specific to your table that corresponds to the nature of your data.

As an example of the latter, let’s take a look at how our sister company — Short.io — manages their customer support operations.

In this example, one button is used to ban users, and another is used to visualize a profile from the user’s perspective — none of these features are available in Rocketadmin out of the box, but they can be painlessly set up from within Rocketadmin itself.

How can you set it up?

Automations work by setting up “Triggers” and “Actions,” which do what the name implies — one is conditional, (adding a row, pressing a button, etc.) and the other is the result.

Out of the box, Rocketadmin supports the following Triggers:

• Adding a row
• Updating a row
• Deleting a row
• Custom

These should be mostly pretty self-explanatory, and together, they cover a full range of functionalities. 

The most flexible option is “Custom,” and to create one of these, you need to use webhooks.

If you’re unfamiliar with webhooks, they’re essentially an event that sends a payload of data to an external system via a URL. Setting one up in Rocketadmin means that you can significantly expand functionality. We’ve also provided boilerplate code in a few of the most popular programming languages — just to get you started.

What can you do with Automations?

Now that we’ve gone through all the different ways you can set Automations in Rocketadmin, let’s look at a few real-world scenarios.

The first scenario should be simple to set up on your own, while the last six will require a bit of ingenuity from your database admin.

Either way, they’re just examples of all the endless things you can do with our platform.

Scenario #1: Send leads to Slack

Keeping track of sales leads is important, but relying on your team seeing leads immediately is difficult, and contacting everyone individually is cumbersome. This is difficult with 5 leads for 3 sales reps, but if you have a larger team that processes even more opportunities, they can add up fast.

Instead, you can set Rocketadmin up to automatically send a Slack notification in a channel of your choice — a channel called “leads,” for example.

This way, adding a row in Rocketadmin can immediately notify your entire team, and they can then pick out individual leads, reacting with an emoji for the ones they’ve taken.

Scenario #2: Back up each action with Google Sheets

Keeping backups is useful — files get lost or become outdated, and online services can face downtime or even deprecation.

While it’s important to be prepared, backups usually have to be done manually, or they only happen at set intervals.

With Rocketadmin, you can set things up to easily and immediately save every change — every new row, any updates and deletions — so that no single change is ever lost.

In this way, you can be sure that every action is automatically backed up with each mouse click.

Scenario #3: Send an SMS through Twilio when a cell is updated

Let’s say, for example, that you’re running a medical facility.

Orchestrating appointments can be chaotic, but connecting Rocketadmin to Twilio (a service that manages SMS messages) via a webhook can make this process much easier.

As just one example, setting a time and date in a cell can send an SMS message to the doctor and the patient 30 minutes before the appointment.

And if a patient needs to reschedule, updating a row can push out notifications announcing the change.

This can free up receptionists to focus their attention on more immediate tasks, allowing them to perform their work even better.

Scenario #4: Escalate a ticket using Zendesk

Zendesk is a powerful platform for managing a fantastic customer service experience.

But sometimes, tickets need to be escalated by an external team — say, a sales one. 

Customers often call sales reps directly, and instead of your team having to deal with a platform they’re unfamiliar with — Zendesk, in this case — they can just press a single button and escalate a ticket to top priority.

Now, customer support teams wouldn’t need to deal with calls from sales, and they can immediately see updates right on Zendesk.

Scenario #5: Generate an invoice with Quickbooks

Invoices are cumbersome to edit, but they’re still essential to produce and get right.

You can create user tables that contain information about your clients. You can also set your company data — like name, address, phone number, etc. In this way, you can populate cells with repeatable data for each invoice, and new data like project name, pricing, etc. can be added manually.

This means that you can then generate invoices with a single click by setting that up as a custom action through a webhook.

While taking a bit of effort to set up, integrating Rocketadmin with Quickbooks can take the headache out of invoicing your clients.

Scenario #6: Trigger a refund through Stripe

Sometimes, things don’t work out and your customer is left unsatisfied with a product or service. In this case, it’s best to act as fast as possible so they’re at least satisfied with your customer support — a great way to potentially get them back later down the line.

But why go through a complicated process when you can immediately address their request?

Setting up an integration with Stripe (or most other payment services) can be a great way to refund a customer immediately with just a single click.

Scenario #7: Schedule a meeting with Google Calendar

Setting up a meeting is the foundation of most businesses, and if you’re a larger company, this can mean multiple meetings each day.

While copying a Google Meet or Zoom meeting can be pretty straightforward, they still require a bit of effort to set up, and they don’t easily allow you to follow ongoing data points like an employee’s position, assigned project, or even their salary.

Setting up Rocketadmin with Google Calendar can not only help your team visualize and keep track of meetings — complete with a Meet link right on Google Calendar — they can also allow you to set a meeting with just a single click.

With this integration, you don’t need to keep your database separate from your meetings. 

Build your own!

If you’re a non-technical person, this might all seem daunting, but if you ask your system administrator, they should be able to set it up for you with just a few lines of code and a few clicks.

Automations is an endlessly powerful feature that lets you expand Rocketadmin into a limitless hub of functionalities. Whether they happen automatically or require the press of a button, webhooks can additionally revolutionize your operations even further.

We hope this guide has helped spark your imagination to figure out use cases for your own business.

And if you ever need help figuring out whether an Automation you’re interested in is possible, you can always contact our support team here.

Good luck!