Google Workspace Automation

More than most businesses use. Gmail filters and labels route mail on arrival. Groups turn role addresses into a membership list rather than a set of forwarding rules. Calendar appointment schedules replace the back-and-forth of booking a meeting. Google Forms writes structured rows into a Sheet instead of prose into an inbox. Templates stop people building this month's quotation from last month's file. None of that requires a developer, none of it can break in a way nobody can fix, and between them they cover a large share of what gets described to us as needing automation.

For most business editions, yes. Google's own announcement lists AppSheet Core as included by default for Business Starter, Standard and Plus, Enterprise Starter and Standard, Frontline Starter and Standard, Nonprofits and Education Standard, and it was already included for Enterprise Plus, Enterprise Essentials Plus and Education Plus. Your domain has to be verified for it to apply. One caveat we would rather state than gloss over: the India-only Base tier is newer than that announcement and we do not assume it is covered, so if you are on Base we confirm it against your own admin console rather than telling you what it should be. Checked September 2026.

Usually not, and we will tell you when the answer is no even though writing the code is the better-paid work. Layers one and two of the ladder on this page — configuration, and forms into sheets — cover most requests, cost very little and can be maintained by whoever is already there. A developer becomes justified when something genuinely cannot be expressed as configuration, when it has to run unattended on a schedule, or when it has to talk to a system outside Workspace.

That depends entirely on whether anyone thought about it in advance, and usually nobody has. An Apps Script trigger runs under the account that authorised it, so suspending or deleting that account stops the automation — typically without telling anybody. If the script also lives in that person's personal Drive rather than a Shared Drive, the code goes with them. Both are avoidable: put the script in a Shared Drive the company owns, have it authorised by an account that is not tied to an individual's employment, and write down what it does. Ten minutes at the time, against a rebuild later.

Often yes, but not by building software first. Start by writing the approval down as it actually happens rather than as the org chart says it happens — who asks, who decides, what they need to see, and what happens when they are on leave. A good proportion of approval problems turn out to be that nobody had agreed the rule, and no amount of automation fixes an undecided rule. Once it is written down, a form and a register usually cover it, and an AppSheet application covers the rest.

Automation is work happening inside Google Workspace without a person doing it — a filter, a form, a scheduled script, an AppSheet application. Integration is Workspace exchanging data with something outside it, such as your accounting system, your CRM or a website. The distinction matters commercially because they fail differently: automation breaks when a person leaves, and integration breaks when somebody else changes their system without telling you. They are scoped and quoted separately for that reason.

Configuration work — layers one and two — is usually a short fixed-price piece, because the scope is knowable in advance. AppSheet and Apps Script work is quoted against a written specification, and we would rather spend an unpaid hour agreeing that specification than quote against a conversation. We also quote maintenance separately and explicitly, because automation that nobody owns is a liability rather than an asset, and pretending otherwise would be the easier sale.