Templates & apps

User guide › Templates & apps

Two different things

The useful test: a template contains no code. Everything it creates you could have built yourself in the builder — it just saves you the afternoon. If what you need is logic rather than structure, you need an app.

Both are admin-only, and both live in the same settings group. The full list of apps is in the app directory.

Browsing templates

The library is a single grid grouped by category, with a search box across the top. Each card carries a badge telling you where it came from — this is the main thing to read before installing.

Cards also show the author and how many workspaces have installed the template.

Look before you commit

There are two levels of looking, and they answer different questions.

Read the contents

A template's page opens with a What's included count — entities, pages, flows and how many sample records it ships. Below that, Preview contents expands into tabs for entities, pages, flows and seed records, down to the individual fields on each entity, the views it defines and the widget types on each dashboard.

This is enough to answer "does this match how we actually work?" without touching your workspace.

Try it for real

Preview goes further: it genuinely installs the template into your workspace, seed data and all, and puts a banner across the top. You click through the dashboards, entity views and record drawers exactly as they'd look in daily use — because they are the real thing.

From the banner you either:

• Keep — promotes the preview to a permanent install. Nothing is reinstalled; the auto-removal just stops.
• Exit preview — uninstalls it immediately.

Do nothing and it removes itself. The preview stays alive while the tab is open and is cleaned up shortly after you close it.

What installing actually does

Installing writes the template's contents into your workspace as normal, editable schema:

• entities, with their fields and the relations between them;
• views on each entity;
• pages and dashboards;
• navigation entries, appended below whatever you already have;
• automations, flows and KPI goals;
• sample records, if the template ships them.

Nothing you already have is overwritten, and re-running the same install does nothing — it's safe to repeat. There's no separate "template mode" afterwards: the entities behave like anything you'd build yourself, and you can rename fields, add views or delete what you don't want.

When something clashes

If a template's entity would collide with one you already have, you're asked what to do before anything is written — per entity, with two choices:

• Rename — the template's entity comes in under a different name, and any pages, nav entries and buttons pointing at it are rewritten to match.
• Skip — that entity is dropped, along with its fields, views, relations and sample records. Dashboard widgets that referenced it will render empty.

You can also cancel the install entirely from that dialog.

Updating and removing

A template's page lists every published version. Before switching you can diff a version against what you currently have installed, so you know what will change. Updates are additive — records you've added are preserved — and you can roll back to an earlier version the same way.

Uninstalling removes the template's pages, nav items and flows. What happens to the entities depends on whether you've used them:

• an entity holding records you added is kept, with its data;
• an entity with none of your records is removed.

A checkbox in the uninstall dialog overrides that and deletes everything under the template's entities. It's clearly marked, and there's no undo — export first if you're not certain.

Apps

Apps are installed from Settings → Billing & Marketplace → Apps. Installing one adds its screens to your sidebar and, in most cases, drops one or more entities into your workspace — real entities with real records, which behave like anything else you'd build.

Uninstalling an app doesn't delete data. It takes the screens away; the records stay, and re-installing picks up where you left off. If uninstalling leaves an entity nothing else uses, you're asked per entity whether to keep it in the sidebar or hide it — hiding removes it from the sidebar only.

Installing an app doesn't hand it to everyone. Most apps are restricted on install and you grant access per app, including which actions inside it each person can take. See Permissions & access.

Apps that pull in other apps

Two kinds of dependency exist, and they behave differently when your plan gets in the way.

• Required. An app that can't work without another one installs it for you. Ecommerce and Manufacturing build on Point of Sale; Onboarding & Offboarding builds on HR Records; most marketing channels build on Audiences. If a required app isn't available to you, the whole install stops.
• Bundled. Some apps package a set of others — Omni Marketing is the one that does this today, pulling in the marketing channels. Bundling is best-effort: anything your plan doesn't include is skipped rather than blocking the install, and shows up in the sidebar with an Upgrade badge so you can see what you're missing.

Managed entities

Some entities are kept in sync by an app or an integration rather than by you. They carry a Synced chip, and two things are locked:

• Their schema can't be edited from the builder.
• Their records can't be created or deleted by hand — edits made here would be overwritten on the next sync.

This applies to entities fed from somewhere else — a calendar, a phone system, a payroll policy set. Most entities an app installs aren't managed in this sense: they're ordinary entities you can extend with your own fields and views.

Publishing your own

A workspace you've built can become a template. It's snapshotted as it stands — entities, pages, nav, flows and KPI goals — and versioned under your authorship. You choose:

• Private — kept in your own library, visible only to your workspace. You can promote it to public later.
• Public — other workspaces can find and install it. Depending on how your BackOffice is run, public listings may pass through a review queue before they appear.

Templates are versioned, so you can ship updates on the same listing; workspaces that already installed an earlier version keep their copy until they choose to update. Unpublishing removes the listing but doesn't touch anyone who already installed it.

Which one do you need?

If you're describing what you want to keep track of — clients, jobs, tickets, properties — you want a template, or the builder. If you're describing something the system should do — take a payment, post a journal, talk to another company's API — you want an app.