Route Clio draft pre-bill review and escalation emails with SMTP

Quick Overview

This workflow pulls draft pre-bills from Clio, sends monthly grouped review emails to responsible attorneys, and runs daily checks to nudge or escalate stale drafts via email while logging each internal notification to a separate audit workflow.

How it works

1. Runs on a monthly schedule and fetches all draft pre-bills from the Clio bills API.
2. Groups the draft pre-bills by each matter’s responsible attorney and skips processing if no drafts are found.
3. Builds and sends one internal review email per attorney listing their draft pre-bills with a link to Clio, and logs the routing event by calling a separate guardrail/audit workflow.
4. Runs daily on a schedule and fetches the current list of draft pre-bills from Clio.
5. Calculates how long each pre-bill has been in draft and selects only those hitting reminder, urgent, or overdue thresholds.
6. Sends grouped reminder/urgent emails to attorneys for due items and sends grouped escalation emails to the managing partner for overdue items, logging each notification through the guardrail/audit workflow.

Setup

1. Add a Clio OAuth2 credential, set the CLIO_BASE_URL variable, and ensure your Clio app has access to the bills endpoint.
2. Add an SMTP email credential and set the sender/recipient variables used in messages (at minimum FIRM_FROM_EMAIL and FIRM_PARTNER_EMAIL).
3. Set n8n Variables for firm context and thresholds as needed (for example FIRM_NAME, FIRM_CLIO_BILLING_URL, FIRM_PREBILL_REMINDER_DAYS, FIRM_PREBILL_URGENT_DAYS, FIRM_PREBILL_ESCALATE_DAYS, and FIRM_PREBILL_ESCALATE_REPEAT_DAYS).
4. Configure and deploy the guardrail/audit sub-workflow referenced by GUARDRAIL_WORKFLOW_ID so logging calls succeed.