What's New in Willow360 v2.5: Clean Exits
Exit Workflow
Conditions have been part of Willow360 for some time. They let any individual action run or be skipped depending on the data collected for each file, which is ideal for decisions such as "only send this to the director if the total is over 10,000". What conditions could not do was stop a file altogether. A purchase order that had been dropped into an invoice workflow would still pass through every remaining step, with each action either running when it should not, or needing its own condition to skip it.
Exit Workflow solves this in one place. It is an automatic Flow Control action that evaluates an exit condition, configured inside the action itself, every time a file reaches it:
• If the condition is met, the workflow ends for that file. No further actions run, and the file is marked as Completed.
• If the condition is not met, the action is skipped and the file continues to the next action as normal.
The exit condition uses exactly the same expression rules as every other condition in Willow360, so you can compare metadata from AI Data, forms, External Data, approvals and system values using operators such as equals, not equal, greater than, contains and starts with, and combine several expressions with AND and OR.
You also decide what happens when a file exits. By default it exits silently. Alternatively, you can send an exit message: an email to one or more recipients, with a subject and text that you write, explaining why the file left the workflow. Recipients can be registered users, external email addresses, or people chosen dynamically from metadata, such as the user who added the file, the approver, or an email address read by AI Data. The subject is prefilled with "The document [File Name] has exited the workflow", and both the subject and text can include the file name and other metadata.
You can add more than one Exit Workflow action to the same workflow, so a file can be checked at several points. Every exit is recorded in the File History as "File exited the workflow", and you can open Show condition to see the exact values that were compared at that moment. If the condition was not met, an "Exit Workflow skipped" entry is recorded instead.
Example 1: Keeping an invoice workflow clean. An accounts payable workflow starts with AI Data, which asks "Is this document an invoice?" as a Yes/No field. An Exit Workflow action follows with the condition Is Invoice equals No and an exit message to the user who added the file: "[File Name] does not appear to be an invoice, so it has not been processed. Please add purchase orders to the Purchase Orders workflow." Only genuine invoices continue to approval, stamping and upload.
Example 2: Stopping unsigned contracts. A contract archiving workflow uses AI Data to ask "Has this contract been signed by both parties?" Contracts where the answer is No exit with an email to the sender asking for a fully signed copy. Nothing incomplete ever reaches the archive.
Example 3: Filtering out documents that need no action. A supplier invoice workflow exits files silently when the extracted Total Amount is less than or equal to 0, so zero-value documents do not create approval tasks for the finance team.
Example 4: Respecting a person's decision. A purchase request workflow includes a Supply Information step where a budget holder chooses Proceed or Cancel from a list. A second Exit Workflow action, placed after that step, ends the workflow when Cancel is chosen and emails the requester to let them know.
Example 5: Catching expired documents. An identity check workflow uses AI Data to read the expiry date from an ID document. If the expiry date is earlier than the current date, the file exits and the onboarding team is asked to request an up-to-date document.
For full configuration guidance and many more examples, see Exit Workflow.
Smaller improvements
Translations. Exit Workflow is translated into every language Willow360 supports, and we have refreshed translations across several languages, including updates to older text that had not previously been translated.
Push notifications and interface modernisation. We have updated the service that delivers browser push notifications and modernised the technology behind the whole Willow360 interface. Neither change alters the way Willow360 works, but both help keep it fast, secure and reliable.
Our take
Release 2.5 is small in scope but, we think, significant in effect. Until now, a workflow could make decisions about individual steps, but it had no way to decide that a file should not be there at all. Exit Workflow gives every workflow a front door with a polite but firm doorkeeper.
In practice, this improves Willow360 in three ways. First, workflows become more reliable: a misdirected file no longer creates approvals, tasks, uploads or report rows that someone then has to undo. Second, they become simpler to build: instead of adding the same condition to every action that should be skipped for a certain kind of file, you add one Exit Workflow action and let everything after it assume the file belongs there. Third, they communicate better: the person who sent the wrong file is told straight away, in plain language, what to do instead.
Combined with AI Data, which can read a document and tell you what it is before anything else happens, Exit Workflow makes it practical to build workflows that check their own input automatically. We expect it to become a standard first step in many invoice, contract and request workflows.
Learn more
How to Configure and Use Each Action
AI Data: Let Your Documents Tell You What You Need to Know