When you first log into Flowster, the main Library page will be blank – unless you already purchased one of our playbooks from the Marketplace.
Assuming you haven’t purchased any pre-made Templates, your main Library page will look like this:
When you click on New, notice there are three items on the drop-down; Template, Workflow, and Folder.
Free Templates
We recommend that you head over to the Marketplace and check out some free SOPs:
https://in.flowster.app/marketplace?priceMax=0
This way you can see some examples of how an SOP template is typically designed before creating your own from scratch.
Folders
If you prefer to keep things more organized, we recommend you start creating folders first and then fill them with Templates as you create them.
In most organizations, you could have Folders for things like Marketing, Sales, Inventory Management, Client Onboarding, etc…
You can have as many as you like and call them whatever you want. Folders serve no purpose other than to help you keep your Templates organized.
Templates
Now that you've created a few Folders, it’s time to get started creating your first Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), which we call a Template.
The first thing you’ll need to do is give the Template a name. You can call it anything you want and you can change the name anytime you like. I suggest you give it a descriptive name. As you can see in the image below, I named mine “My First Template” (shown in RED). In reality, you are going to want to choose a much more descriptive name like Onboard a New Client or Issue a Purchase Order or Onboard a New Employee, etc…
You should also take a moment to write a description. This is where you describe when this Template should be used, what it is for, and the type of person that it would most likely be assigned to. (Shown in GREEN)
Once you’ve given your SOP Template a name and a description, it’s time to start adding the step-by-step instructions. To create these instructions, you are going to use a combination of Tasks and Sections.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the Section Buttons (Shown in RED) will appear on the right-hand side of a Template when you’re creating or editing it. The different Sections available are:
- Text
- Image
- Video
- File
- Checkbox
- Request Short Text
- Request Long Text
- Request Email
- Request URL
- Request File
- Request Date
- Dependent Workflow
You may have noticed that the last 6 Sections contain the word Request in their name. That’s because you would use these when you want the person doing the work to input some type of data into the Workflow as they are doing it.
In the image below is a screenshot of the Workflow of our demo SOP Template. As you can see below, in the first task (Client Details), when we designed the SOP Template, we made use of several request sections so that when a Workflow was run and assigned to a team member, they could input the required information.
