# Automation in BlueHill — webhooks, API, and event-driven workflows > BlueHill's automation today is built on a webhook + API foundation: event-driven outbound webhooks, inbound email automation via Resend, and an API for any custom workflow. Rule-builder UI on the roadmap. ## What's shipped today BlueHill's automation today is an **event + webhook foundation**, not a visual rule builder. We're being upfront about that because the marketing-tool category has trained users to expect a Zapier-style canvas with drag-drop conditions, and we don't ship that yet. What we do ship: 1. **Outbound webhooks on every meaningful event** — ticket lifecycle, customer-task status changes, board status changes, form submissions, customer updates. Fire to any HTTPS endpoint. 2. **Inbound email automation via Resend** — every email arriving at your support address is captured, threaded, and either creates a ticket or appends to an existing one. Outbound replies go back through the same thread. 3. **A REST API** — read and write every entity in BlueHill (tickets, tasks, forms, customers) from your own code, your data warehouse, or your existing automation tooling. 4. **Scheduled task surfacing** — the `followup_date` field on `CustomerTask` puts work back on the top of the queue when nothing else has moved. 5. **Board-status-change recording** — every status transition is logged via `record_board_status_change` to the activity timeline, which is queryable. This covers the common "when X happens, do Y" automation patterns, just at a code/API level rather than a UI level. ## How most teams use it today The three highest-leverage patterns from real customers: ### Pattern 1: At-risk health → Slack - BlueHill webhook fires on `customer_health_changed` event. - Your endpoint receives the payload, checks the new health value. - If amber/red, POST a formatted message to your team's Slack channel with the customer name + link. A weekend's work for any engineer. About 8–15 lines of code if you use Zapier instead. ### Pattern 2: Milestone hit → data warehouse - BlueHill webhook fires on `customer_task_completed` for milestone tasks. - Your endpoint writes the row to Snowflake / BigQuery / Postgres. - Your BI dashboards now show real-time onboarding velocity. ### Pattern 3: Time entry approved → invoice draft - BlueHill webhook fires on `time_entry_approved`. - Your endpoint groups the time entries by customer + project, computes the dollar amount, creates a draft invoice in QuickBooks via the QuickBooks API. You can wire this up in a day. We're working on a native version so it'll be a toggle eventually. ## What the API exposes The REST API mirrors the data model: - `GET /api/customers` / `POST /api/customers` - `GET /api/tickets` / `POST /api/tickets` / `PATCH /api/tickets/:id` - `GET /api/customer_tasks` / `POST /api/customer_tasks` / `PATCH /api/customer_tasks/:id` - `GET /api/forms` / `POST /api/forms` / `POST /api/forms/:id/submissions` - `GET /api/activity` for the interaction timeline - And so on for boards, templates, members, organizations. Authentication is via API key (managed in the Settings → API Keys page, backed by the `api_keys` route in the backend). Keys can be scoped by permission level — read-only, customer-scoped, full-admin. ## What's on the roadmap We don't pre-announce dates. The active focus areas for automation: - **Visual rule builder** — Zapier-style trigger/condition/action UI inside BlueHill - **Pre-built automation recipes** — common patterns like "auto-create ticket from form", "notify owner on SLA breach", "auto-progress task when form completes" as one-click templates - **Native integrations** — Slack, QuickBooks, HubSpot wired in directly (today they're via webhook/API) If you want a heads-up when these ship, watch the [changelog](/changelog) or email sales@usebluehill.com. ## Where BlueHill is honest about trade-offs If a no-code, visual, drag-drop rule builder is a hard requirement for you right now — Monday and ClickUp ship that today and BlueHill doesn't. We'll get there. In the meantime, the webhook + API foundation handles roughly 80% of the automation patterns customers actually want, and the remaining 20% lands when the UI ships. The honest take: if your team has any engineering capacity, the webhook path is more flexible than the canvas rule builders anyway. If your team has zero engineering and needs everything no-code, the gap is real. ## Built for - [SaaS implementation teams](/use-cases/saas) wiring BlueHill into existing data pipelines - [Agencies](/use-cases/agencies) integrating BlueHill with their invoicing tooling ## Try it [Start a 14-day free trial](https://app.usebluehill.com/sign-up) — no credit card required.