Services are a simple way of grouping jobs together, or of making a job recur on a regular basis. Here we will show you how you can utilise Services to mange your workflows.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

What are services?


Within Senta there are three main building blocks when it comes to Workflows - Services, Jobs, and Tasks. Services are the top level of those building blocks.


A Service is a collection of Jobs. Senta can collate several Jobs together to form one overall service to be provided to clients, such as Tax Returns, or Client Onboarding.


Services are really important in setting up recurring Jobs as you are able to set up job frequency at this level, as well as specify job start dates. You are also able to apply filters on to Services so you can specify what clients a job should kick off for or how far in advance you would like Senta to create these jobs.



How do services interact with tasks and jobs?


This diagram shows the three main building blocks and how they work together to build a Workflow;



As you can see, a service encompasses a job in the same way a job encompasses tasks. It is the top level of the workflow structure that denotes when jobs should kick off, and for what clients they should kick off for.


A service can contain more than one job too, or perhaps even several instances of the same job but with different criteria for when they kick off. A service is a crucial part of automating workflows within Senta.


You can find more on how services, jobs, and tasks interact here.



Where can I find services?


Service templates


Senta comes with many pre built Services for you, you can find these if you Go to Settings > Services



This will present you with a list of your available services, you can click into any of these to view the service in more detail. You will also be able to see at a glance which jobs are contained within these services, and the frequency with which they run.



It is worth noting that by setting a frequency at the service level you are able to set up jobs to repeat. This enables you to have multiple jobs within the same service but with different frequency. 


As an example, you can see that the default Payroll service has many variations of the payroll job:



You can read more about hot to set up repeating jobs as part of a service here.


Services on a client


Each client has their own dedicated services tab. Go to any client and click Services.


There you will be able to see the list of services that the client currently has selected, along with the details of the jobs contained within that service and when they are next set to run.



To add or remove services on a client you can click Edit.


This will then present you with all the available services that you may select for a client.


It is worth noting that Automatic Services will not show under this tab.



Can I create new services?


You can create new services, or edit existing services as you need to.


Click here for a guide on how to set up a service from scratch.



What if I change or delete part of a service?


Should you amend or delete a service, or part of a service, it is worth noting that Senta will not automatically delete any jobs that have already been kicked off.


If you would like to remove part of a service or amend it, it is recommended to cancel off any unneeded jobs before you make the necessary amendments.


Once a new service or part of a service is added, Senta will automatically pick it up and run it based on the criteria you have set.