Templates

The words you send over and over, kept once — Dustav and your workflows use them word for word.

Most of the email a business sends has been written before: the acknowledgement you've refined over three years, the reminder that finally stopped the no-shows, the "your order is ready" note. A template is one of those, kept once and followed verbatim. The one idea worth getting exactly right:

A workflow answers when and to whom. A template holds the words and the files. Nothing runs from a template.

What a template is

One email kept once: a title (how you and Dustav refer to it), a subject, the body, an optional note about when it's used, and the documents that always travel with it — a checklist PDF, a price list, your studio policies. Templates have their own tab because they're their own shape: a document doesn't have a subject or attachments; a template does.

Parts that change each time are written as [blanks] — [CLASS NAME], [DATE]. When Dustav drafts from the template it fills the ones it has a real source for (the class on your calendar, the name on the order) and leaves the rest as brackets for you. It never invents a blank's contents.

Making one

Create template opens with Make your own — paste any email you already send — then the kinds most businesses keep: a booking reminder, a thank-you with a feedback link, a "got it" reply, a ready-for-pickup notice, a waitlist note, the standard answer to a question you get every week. Each shows the outline of what gets saved (your words, with the parts that change as blanks) and what Dustav will ask for. Pick one, paste the wording you already send, and Dustav saves it exactly — brackets, formatting and all. It doesn't tidy or "improve" your words; the next draft is yours, not an approximation.

How a workflow uses one

Two shapes of workflow draft from templates:

• A Schedule always does. The morning run reads the template fresh each morning — so an edit is in tomorrow's drafts with no change to the rule.
• An Email workflow can. Point it at a template and its draft follows the words exactly; leave it off and Dustav writes the email fresh from a short hint. The reply mode of an Email workflow is where a template most often lives: "when someone books a kiln firing, the reply on that thread follows the acknowledgement template."

The link is by reference, never a copy. One template can serve several rules — the class reminder used by three different schedules — and editing it once changes all of them. A workflow's card shows which template it drafts from; a template's card shows which workflows send it, and reads by hand only when none does. The pills at the top split them the same way: Workflow and By name.

Documents ride on templates

The files a template carries are documents, linked — never copied. Your studio-hours PDF lives once in Documents and rides on as many templates as need it; replace the file and every template, and every future draft from every workflow, picks up the new one. Upload the real file you already have rather than asking Dustav to recreate it: the customer receives the original, and Dustav reads a text twin it made once at upload.

By hand, too

New email from this, on any template, opens the composer with the subject, the words, and the files already on it, waiting for an address. In chat, "send the waitlist notice to everyone on the Wheel Throwing 101 waitlist" drafts from the template you named, verbatim, and says so. A template is useful before it ever has a workflow.

The note is a note

A template can carry a line about when it's used — "the standard reply when someone books a kiln firing." That line is for finding the right template; it doesn't make anything happen. If you want the acknowledgement to go out whenever a firing booking arrives, that's an Email workflow in reply mode pointing at the template, and it shows on the Workflows tab like every other rule. Every when is a workflow card — the Workflows tab is the one complete list of what happens when mail arrives, and a template that could fire on its own would be a rule hiding somewhere else.

Every draft from a template — by hand, by a workflow, or by the morning run — waits in Drafts for your click. Nothing sends itself.