Pick your first Playbook
A Playbook is a small repeatable workflow with an owner, a schedule, and a goal. thola ships with ~40 of them. Picking the right one for this week matters more than learning all of them.
The scene
You're three weeks into using thola. You've been doing things ad-hoc — asking questions, running individual flows. You're realising some flows would be useful every Monday, not just when you remember. That's a Playbook.
How to pick — the matching exercise
Match what's keeping you up at night to one of these:
| If your worry is… | The Playbook is… | When to run |
|---|---|---|
| Cash / runway dropping | Cost Diagnosis | Once, when a runway flag fires |
| Overdue invoices piling up | AR Cleanup | Weekly (Wednesday) |
| Deals not moving | Stuck Deal Unblock | Weekly (Friday) |
| Reps not consistent on follow-up | Cold Lead Re-warm | Monthly |
| Monthly close taking too long | Monthly Close | Monthly (end-of-month) |
| GST filing stress | GST Filing Prep | Monthly (5th) |
| New hire onboarding messy | Onboarding | Per new hire |
| Payroll runs taking too long | Payroll Run | Monthly |
| Burnout signals appearing | Burnout Intervention | When triggered (Red Flag) |
| Vendor performance unclear | Vendor Performance Review | Quarterly |
| Stockouts happening | Low Stock Reorder | Daily (auto-triggered) |
| Counter reconciliation drifting | Counter Reconciliation | End of each shift |
| Co-founder syncs irregular | Co-founder Sync Prep | Weekly |
| Board updates rushed | Board Update | Monthly |
| Quarterly review chaotic | Quarterly Pipeline Health | Quarterly |
| Founder hours imbalanced | Weekly Check-in | Monday 9 AM |
| Goal slipping | Goal Reset | When goal probability drops below 30% |
Pick one. Just one. The temptation to run all of them is real — resist.
The steps to run a Playbook
1. Find it
Playbook → Templates, or in chat: "Run the AR Cleanup Playbook".
2. Read the description
Each template has:
- What it does — 1–2 sentences
- Trigger — schedule, on-demand, or flag-triggered
- Owner — who's responsible for the run (defaults to you, editable)
- Estimated time — total human time across the run (usually 15–60 min)
- Steps — the ordered list
Most are obvious. Some have versions (Onboarding has a "lite" and a "full" version, for example).
3. Tap Install + Run
Installing makes the Playbook available in your workspace. Running starts the first invocation.
Most Playbooks run their first step immediately. Some pause and wait for input (e.g. Onboarding waits for you to mark a new hire as "starting"). You'll see the run in Playbook → Runs.
4. Walk through the steps
Each step is one of:
- Agent action — runs by itself
- Form — small input from you
- Task — for the owner to do (with a due date)
- Wait — paused for a duration
- Decision — branches based on a condition
- External call — drafts a message, you confirm send
Confirm each step that pauses. The run completes when all steps are done.
5. The "want to make this recurring?" prompt
After the first successful run, thola asks: "Want me to run this every Monday?"
Say yes for one or two. Recurring Playbooks are where the compound interest lives — you stop thinking about them, they keep happening.
The most-loved first Playbook
Across our customer base, the single most-loved first Playbook is AR Cleanup. Two reasons:
- It produces visible cash. Within 2–3 runs, you can point to specific invoices that got paid because the reminder went out.
- It runs in 20 minutes a week, not an hour. Low friction.
If you're not sure where to start, this is the one.
The gotchas
Don't run three Playbooks at once your first week
Pick one. Run it. Get comfortable. Then pick the second. Founders who try to run five Playbooks simultaneously in week one usually disable all of them by week three.
Customise the template once, not every run
The shipped templates are starting points. After your first run, ask yourself: "What would I change about this for next time?"
Maybe an extra step, maybe a different default owner, maybe a wait duration shortened. Click Edit Playbook, make the changes, save. Now every future run uses your customised version.
Don't fork into your own Playbook from scratch
Many founders try to build a custom Playbook from scratch in week two. It almost never lands well. The shipped templates encode 6 months of feedback from real customers; your scratch version doesn't.
Customise. Don't rebuild.
Watch the audit log
Every Playbook run leaves an audit trail. Playbook → Runs → [run] → Audit. You'll see every step, who did what, when. Useful for:
- Showing your accountant exactly what got sent and to whom
- Reviewing what went wrong if a run didn't produce the expected outcome
- Compliance / regulatory reviews
What you'll feel after a month
Three things settle:
- Your week has rhythm. Monday is the Weekly Check-in. Wednesday is AR Cleanup. Friday is Stuck Deal Unblock. Each one is 20 minutes. The compound effect is visible by month three.
- You stop manually triggering things you forget. The Playbook remembers. You don't.
- You feel less "what should I be doing right now?" anxiety. The Playbook tells you.
What's next
- Ask better questions — between Playbook runs, the chat is your friend
- Upload data the right way — Playbooks work better with clean data
- Reference → Playbook editor — when you're ready to customise or build your own
A Playbook is a small piece of automation that respects your judgement — pauses for you on the things that matter, runs by itself on the things that don't. Pick one. Try it this week.