Tuesday, 9:41 am. Anna Wiśniewska submits the “Request a quote” form on the website of Instalacje Mazur, a seven-person company, and her email lands between an invoice from a wholesaler and a manufacturer’s newsletter. Form leads do not identify the person responsible or provide a date for the next step in the email. On Friday, Tomek finds the enquiry while scrolling through the inbox, but Anna already has two other quotes.
A lead loses out in the inbox because it has no owner or date
A form email is easy to overlook because it does not identify the person responsible or set a due date for making contact. A task changes this: you set a high priority and due date, then assign a specific person.
At Instalacje Mazur, Tomek assumes Michał will reply. Michał thinks Tomek is handling it. Nobody can see the date after which the enquiry becomes overdue.
Context is missing too. To assess Anna’s enquiry, you need to open the message and find the town, the floor area of the house and the expected completion date. An invoice has a payment date. A “request for a quote” has nothing.
42 hours is enough time for a customer to move on
Harvard Business Review described a study of 2241 companies in 2011. Only 37 per cent responded to online enquiries within an hour, 23 per cent did not respond at all, and the average response time among companies that made contact was 42 hours.
The same publication cites an analysis of 1.25 million leads. Making contact within an hour made a qualifying conversation about seven times more likely than making contact an hour later. This is not about preparing the entire quote immediately. It is about noticing the enquiry and deciding on the next step.
Monitoring the inbox manually works until the first holiday, site visit or day packed with meetings. A rule does not forget.
Form leads are turned from emails into tasks
You can turn form leads into tasks using a rule in the Automations module. The rule follows a WHEN - IF - DO structure: the trigger detects a new email, the conditions separate enquiries from the rest of the mail, and the actions create a task and can add an AI-generated summary.
You will not find a ready-made template called “Form lead”. You build the sales rule yourself using the available building blocks.
| Block | Setting | Result |
|---|---|---|
| WHEN | New email in inbox | The rule responds to a message received in its author’s inbox |
| IF | Inbox biuro@, subject contains “wycen” or “zgłoszenie” | Invoices and newsletters do not proceed any further |
| DO 1 | Write message with AI | A summary of the enquiry appears in the event thread |
| DO 2 | Create task | A case is created with a high priority and a due date for making contact |
The root “wycen” covers “wycena”, “wycenę” and “wyceny”, among other forms. It is a small change, but it reduces the number of messages missed because a condition is too specific.
A single rule, also called a WHEN - IF - DO Recipe in the module, can perform up to 10 actions. It works within the application, without an external automation service. It only responds to its author’s inboxes, so nobody else can use it to see your mail. You can find more examples in the overview of Automations in Task Manager.
A task gives the lead an owner, a due date and a visible delay
In a task, you set the subject, description, priority, due date and assignees. The colour on the list immediately shows whether the task is due today, still has time remaining or is already overdue.
Anna’s email arrives at 9:41 am on Tuesday. Two minutes later, the sales list contains a task called “Contact: Anna Wiśniewska”, with a high priority and a due date of Wednesday. Tomek opens it, selects “Edit”, chooses Michał in the “Assignees” section and saves the change.
He can also tell the AI Assistant: “Assign the task Contact: Anna Wiśniewska to Michał”. The AI Assistant understands natural language, so there is no need to learn command syntax.
You enter the date promised to the customer in the task. If someone moves the due date, the thread records the previous date. The same record is kept after a change of status, priority or assignees. There is no need to reconstruct what happened from memory.
You can link an email thread to a task, but this link is only a navigation shortcut. It does not share the contents of a private inbox with anyone else. The Mail in Task Manager page explains how inboxes work.
The AI Assistant prepares the customer report, not the rule itself
The AI Assistant helps you prepare a complete client report, but the rule itself does not create it. A rule can create a task and add an AI-generated summary, while you save the finished report as a note in a folder you have created.
The prompt could be:
Read this enquiry and prepare a report: who is writing, their company, what they need, when they need it and the suggested first step.
For Instalacje Mazur, the report has four short sections:
- Anna Wiśniewska, contact from the quote request form,
- a 160 m² house in Swarzędz,
- a heat pump needed “before the season starts”,
- first step: call and ask about the building's insulation.
Michał can immediately see the size of the house, its location and the expected deadline. He can start the conversation by asking about the building's insulation instead of reading the entire message again. If the report needs to be sent to a subcontractor, you can export the note as a PDF, Word or TXT file.
The note remains private until you share it. You can give another person view-only or editing access, while assigning the note to a Workspace acts as a label and does not automatically grant access.
You create the folder yourself. Notes directories are shared with the Files module, so the “Leads” folder will appear in both places.
A prompt reduces the work involved in creating the task
You do not have to complete every field of a new case manually. You can ask the AI Assistant:
Create a task called “Call Anna Wiśniewska” in the Sales Workspace, set a high priority and a due date of tomorrow.
The AI Assistant will open the form with the fields already completed. Before saving, you can review the result and change the name, due date or description. A similar process is shown in the example of automation described in plain language.
The AI Assistant will not respond unless an administrator configures a provider, API key and model in AI Settings. Task Manager supports OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and xAI Grok using the client's own key, with no intermediary mark-up. For more information, see the description of the AI Assistant.
Testing and History show where the rule went wrong
The Test button shows what would happen if the rule ran, but does not perform any actions. The run history covers 30 days and records completed runs, reasons why a rule was skipped and error messages.
On Friday, Tomek opens the skipped items and sees that the website form used the subject line “Request a quote”, which was not covered by the “quotes” condition. He adds another phrase, tests the rule again and only then leaves it running.
Task Manager stops loops, limits the number of runs per hour and pauses a rule after three consecutive errors, notifying the author by email. The rule performs actions using the author's permissions.
If you use the Write a message with AI action, the email summary and the context needed to prepare it are sent to the selected model provider. The request is sent using your key. Application data remains on your server, but the request itself is sent externally. Mail as a source of AI knowledge is disabled by default and must be enabled by an administrator.
AI is not required to capture leads. Conditions based on the inbox, sender and subject will create a task without it, but there will be no automatic summary.
This automation will not read everything for you
The automation will not extract a promised deadline from the email or select a salesperson based on the enquiry description. You set the date and assignee in the task, or create separate rules based on documented conditions such as the subject and sender.
AI does not have OCR, a mechanism for reading text from scans. A scanned PDF and an old binary DOC file will not be read like ordinary message content.
The AI Assistant will not send an email without your approval. Automations include a separate “send an email from your inbox” action - you decide whether to add it to the rule at all, and you can check the rule with the Test button before enabling it.
When the application is closed, sending email notifications requires CRON, a scheduler that runs tasks on the server. Without it, messages are sent when someone is using the application.
Mail and Automations require Pro
Mail and Automations are available with Pro. Task Manager also works without AI, so you can create tasks from messages based on the inbox, sender and subject without connecting a model.
The Task Manager licence is a one-off purchase and is perpetual. It includes 12 months of updates, after which renewing access to new versions is optional. Without renewal, you can continue using your existing version. The terms are explained on the Perpetual licence page.
Tomorrow, check the three most recent enquiries
Tomorrow morning, open the three most recent leads from the form and calculate how many hours they waited for the first response. If any of them waited longer than a day, create one rule: WHEN a new email arrives, IF it is sent to biuro@ and the subject contains “quote”, THEN create a task due the following day.
Then use Test and check whether the rule distinguishes an enquiry from an invoice and a newsletter. You can see the complete process in the Demo.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to use the AI Assistant to pick up form leads?
No, the AI Assistant is not needed to create a task from a message. The “new email in inbox” trigger and conditions based on the subject, sender or inbox work without AI, but they will not prepare an automatic summary or report.
Who can see the note and the message from my inbox?
Only you can see your inbox and private note - even the administrator cannot access them. You can share a note with viewing or editing permission, while linking an email to a task does not share the email content.
Can I connect a Gmail or Outlook inbox?
Yes, Task Manager connects to inboxes via IMAP and SMTP, including Gmail, Outlook and accounts hosted by Polish providers. A Google account may require an app password in accordance with Google’s policies.
What happens if the rule misses a genuine enquiry?
The message will remain in the inbox, and Run History will show why it was skipped for the past 30 days. After changing the condition, you can use the Test button to see the result without performing any actions.
Do I need the Pro plan to automate leads?
Yes, Mail and Automations are included in the Pro plan. You pay for the licence once, 12 months of updates are included, and renewal after that is optional.
Sources
- Task Manager, Automations
- Task Manager, guide: Automations
- Task Manager, Mail
- Task Manager, guide: Mail
- Task Manager, Notes
- Task Manager, AI Assistant
- Task Manager, Perpetual licence
- Harvard Business Review, James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, David Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”
- Google, Google Account Help, “Sign in with app passwords”
The Task Manager Team - we write about teamwork, AI in business and keeping tasks organised, using examples from Task Manager, software installed on your own server. Task Manager has been developed by Blue Creation Group (Piotr Łącz) since 2013 and is used by organisations including Neonet, the Military University of Technology and Polpharma - read customer reviews. We check our articles against the user guide and the latest version of the software.
