How-To Guides

The rest of the documentation teaches one feature at a time. These How-To Guides do the opposite. Each one takes a real job a small business actually needs done, then walks it end to end, combining several Backbuild features into a single practical workflow. You follow the real interface, click by click, and finish with a working result you can keep using. After this page you will know which guide matches the job in front of you and what each one sets up.

What a How-To Guide Is

A reference page answers the question "what does this feature do." A How-To Guide answers a different question: "how do I get this specific job done." So a reference page on Views explains every view type and setting, while a How-To Guide on tracking business locations tells you exactly which entity type to build, which fields to add, which records to create, and which views to save, so that at the end you can actually answer "which of my stores are open" and "how much revenue comes from each region."

  • Scenario-based. Each guide starts from a concrete goal a real team has, not from a feature.
  • End to end. A guide combines whatever features the job needs (Mail, entity types, views, sharing) into one continuous workflow, rather than treating them separately.
  • Walked, not summarized. Every step tells you what to click and what you will see on screen, so you can follow along in your own workspace.
  • Honest about today. A guide teaches only what the product does right now. Where a capability is not yet live, the guide shows you the live workflow that gets the same job done and says so plainly.

These guides are written for the person doing the work: an owner, an office manager, an operations lead, or anyone setting the workspace up for a team. You do not need to be technical. Where a step benefits from the API or an AI agent, the guide links to the reference and keeps the main path in the interface.

The Guides

Set Up an Email Auto-Responder Handle inbound inquiries automatically with a Virtual Worker: hire a Support Agent worker that reads each real message and drafts an on-brand reply for a person to review and send, with a human always sending the outside reply. Track Business Locations with Custom Views Model a store or branch network as structured data: build a Location entity type with typed fields, add real location records, and save views that answer which sites are open, revenue by region, and what is planned next.

Before You Start

Every guide assumes you have a Backbuild account and a workspace. If you are brand new, create your account and meet the workspace first, then come back and pick the job you need to do. The pages below give you the foundation the guides build on.

  • Getting Started: create your account, meet your workspace, and finish your first project.
  • Platform Overview: how organizations, projects, and your data model fit together.
  • Backbuild Mail: create a mailbox and send your first message, the starting point for the email guide.
  • Entity Types: the building block the business-locations guide uses to model your data.