Automate Your Business Processes with the Xentral Flow Editor

What happens when your ERP reacts faster than your team? 

Orders process themselves. Financial data lands with your tax advisor on time. Inventory updates across every channel before anyone even clicks a button. This isn't a future vision. It's what happens when Xentral Flows is running.

Xentral Flows are built on a simple but powerful logic: when event X occurs, run action Y. Automatically, instantly, without a manual trigger. Xentral already ships with strong core processes for logistics, warehousing, and sales. Flows let you extend that logic flexibly, without the rigid corset of a classic ERP.

Every growing SMB eventually hits the same wall: orders climb, but the manual clicks in the background eat away the margin. Xentral Flows close exactly that gap.

Which processes can you automate with Xentral Flows right away? 

You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Our Workflow Library already gives you a range of pre-built flows that you can activate with a few clicks to save time immediately and cut errors:

• AI product copy on demand: Generates high-converting, SEO-optimized descriptions the moment you create a new product.
• Smart warehouse assignment: Routes orders automatically to the right fulfillment warehouse based on destination country or priority.
• Automatic margin protection: Stops a shipment on the spot if the purchase price is higher than the sale price, so you don't ship at a loss.
• Holiday adjustment: Shifts delivery dates around public holidays automatically so your customers still get their orders on time.
• Bulk invoice printing: Generates every invoice for a batch of selected orders in a single step.
• Free-gift trigger: Adds a free extra to any order above a defined minimum value, lifting your average order value automatically.

Build your own ERP automations: How does the Xentral Flow Editor work? 

Until now, you've mostly experienced Xentral Flows from the "consumer" side: you activated ready-made automations from our Workflow Library for free and monitored them in the dashboard. If you wanted to adjust a process or build your own logic from scratch, that was a project for Xentral partners inside the powerful Xentral Connect backend.

That's changing now. We're bringing the production side directly into your Xentral interface. With the new Flow Editor for customers, we're closing the gap between standard and custom. Here's how the layers stack up:

• Workflow Library (no-code): Activate ready-to-use standard flows with a single click.
• Flow Editor for customers (low-code): Adjust library flows in an intuitive interface or build new ones from scratch by drag-and-drop.
• Xentral Connect backend (partner access): Still the home for highly complex integration projects, scripting, and deep backend architecture.

The result: maximum flexibility, fast adjustments when the market shifts, and no more waiting on external developers.

Flow Editor or AI agent: when do you use which? 

Rule-based flows and AI agents solve fundamentally different problems, which is exactly why they don't replace each other, they work together. A flow in the Xentral Flow Editor is deterministic: the rule is fixed, the result is identical every time, and everything is fully traceable. That makes flows the right choice for anything that demands precision and repeatability, like DATEV exports, shipping labels, inventory reconciliation, or invoicing.

An AI agent in the Agent Hub works differently. It interprets, weighs, and makes judgment calls based on probabilities. That makes it strong wherever inputs are unstructured: a return email, an ambiguous product inquiry, a payment without a clear reference.

The key difference in practice: flows barely consume resources even across millions of transactions, because they don't need to interpret anything. AI agents consume more, but they deliver decisions no rule-based system could make. Together, they give you an ERP that's both precise and intelligent.

As Xentral moves further toward becoming an AI ERP, many merchants ask: is AI about to replace classic workflows? The clear answer: no. They complement each other perfectly.

How it plays out in practice: flow meets AI agent 

The real magic happens when the two worlds merge. You can, for example, set up a data- and process-safe flow for your returns management. For the 5% of edge cases that don't fit the pattern (say, an angry, unstructured customer email), you simply plug an AI agent into the flow as a process step. The agent interprets the text, proposes the solution, and the deterministic flow executes the refund exactly as defined.

Bottom line 

Manually triggered processes aren't a minor annoyance. They're a structural brake on growth. Every click that repeats daily is capacity your team is missing for more important work. With Xentral Flows, you automate rule-based processes so they run without your input: reliably, traceably, and at whatever scale your volume demands. The Flows Library ships ready-to-use automations for the most common commerce processes. The Flow Editor gives you the control to build your own logic without waiting on a developer. And where rules hit their limits, AI agents step in, not as a replacement but as an extension. The result: an ERP that doesn't just administer, it works alongside you.