A practical 5‑day plan you can follow this week
- Day 1 — Inventory: list every automation and integration you rely on (HubSpot workflows, Zapier/Zapier-like zaps, webhooks, payment syncs). Note what a successful run looks like (new contact created, invoice posted, owner assigned). Keep this to one A4 or one sheet row per automation.
- Day 2 — Build exception lists: create HubSpot lists and a shared Google Sheet/Excel workbook that will hold counts and exceptions (see next section for exact names). Put a column for owner, backup, last-checked and notes.
- Day 3 — Alerts: set simple alerts — HubSpot internal email or a workflow that posts to a Slack channel — for the highest-risk lists. If your tools can’t send Slack, email the named owner. Keep alerts short and actionable.
- Day 4 — Run initial checks and tune thresholds: run the checks, capture the counts in your sheet, and adjust what you consider an exception so you’re not alerted every day for normal variance.
- Day 5 — Weekly report and handover: create a one-page weekly report template in the sheet that shows the checks, counts, trends and actions. Agree who publishes it to the team and who investigates exceptions.
Exact checks and exception lists to create (copy these names)
- HubSpot list: "Automation Exceptions — Workflow stalled >48h" — filter contacts that were enrolled into a workflow more than 48 hours ago and have not reached the workflow goal or reached the ‘completed’ state. This catches stuck enrolments and missed outbound steps.
- HubSpot list: "Automation Exceptions — Missing Owner" — filter recently created contacts (last 7 days) where Contact Owner is unknown or set to the default placeholder. Use this to spot handoffs that never assigned an owner.
- HubSpot list: "Integration Exceptions — Target missing" — filter records created in the source system in the last 24–48 hours that do not have the expected property set by the integration in the target (for example: invoice ID blank, invoice status not synced). If you don’t have a target property, use counts (see sheet below).
- Sheet checks: in your shared sheet add rows for "Daily new source vs target count", "Duplicate contacts created today", and "Webhook failures (logged)". Capture the daily totals and a short note of any anomalies.
Who owns each check, thresholds to act on, and the short weekly report
Assign a single owner and a backup for every check. Owners should be named in the sheet and alerted directly. A good ownership split is: ops or CRM owner for HubSpot lists, product/tech for webhook/integration failures, and finance for invoice/payment sync checks.
Start with conservative thresholds and tighten after a week of data. Suggestions: investigate when you see either (a) more than 5 exceptions in 24 hours for the same check, (b) an increase of 100% vs the previous 7‑day average, or (c) any single critical business event missing (eg an invoice not created). For low-volume businesses you may prefer absolute thresholds (1–2 exceptions triggers) rather than percentage changes.
Keep the weekly report to one sheet page: list each check, owner, last run date, count this week, trend (up/down), and status (OK / Investigating / Fixed). The owner fills the action column with what they did and how long the fix took. Use a one‑line alert message in Slack/email like: "Automation Exceptions — Missing Owner: 7 today. Owner @Jane — please investigate."
If you want a ready-to-use sheet template or a one‑page checklist to run this first week, Optira can provide a practical starter pack and an initial remote review to help you tune the thresholds.