How I Organize Remote Automation Work Without Losing My Mind

1. Folder structure only works when everyone names Zaps the same way

My first mistake was assuming people would name things like I do. I had a neat naming convention: [Client] - [Function] - [Trigger/Action]. Clean, sortable, very Google Sheets glasses-pusher of me. Then Sam cloned a Zap and named it “OKR Sync Mk2” and now we’ve got six identical Zaps doing slightly different things with identical avatars and vague timestamps.

So step one is: get alignment on naming. Not just conventions — the actual goal of each automation. We use threads in Slack to approve naming during builds. It saves everyone from mysterious draft Zaps titled “buffer test” or “AC test x4 FINAL”.

• Create a shared doc and agree on terminology: Sync vs Update vs Zap vs Trigger
• Set up team folders in Zapier with access by stakeholder group (e.g. Ops, Product, Clients)
• Name Zapier automations based on their output, not their trigger — e.g. “Send weekly team update” is better than “RSS to Gmail”
• Use emojis sparingly — they don’t sort consistently between systems

Also, if you open a Zap and the first action is “Formatter” and you have no clue where the data is coming from, chances are no one documented anything. I’ve started adding a code step at the top that just has a comment about what this does and why.

2. Shared credentials break quietly when someone resets their auth

I once spent a full afternoon debugging a team-wide ClickUp sync that had randomly started 403-ing on every run. Turned out someone updated their password after leaving a coworking space Wi-Fi and it invalidated the token in Zapier silently. No error email to the account, no visible red bar unless you were already in the editor.

So now everything gets connected via a service account with MFA disabled and no rotating keys. Slightly worse security, but at least it doesn’t silently die on us mid-sprint. This bites harder when you’re using something like Notion, which does not clearly show which integration is failing when a linked DB stops syncing. The webhook might still be firing—it just doesn’t have access anymore.

One thing that helped: tagging each connection with the actual email used and creating a Notion DB with the last login date per account. Does nobody else do this? It’s saved us so much pain. Zapier does not expose this in the UI reliably.

3. Zap activation status is meaningless during cloning and edits

If you’ve ever duplicated a folder of Zaps and assumed the “On/Off” status meant anything consistent, you’re not alone. I had three automations that were toggled off in the UI, but still running. Turned out they were archived versions being called by a webhook from a Make scenario.

This happens because webhook URLs don’t care whether the Zap is on or not — they’ll still POST to the URL if it hasn’t been updated. Even worse in situations where a Zap has a Schedule by Zapier trigger. If you forget to turn off the old clone, it’ll keep firing twice a day until someone notices duplicate messages in a Slack channel and asks, “Who wired this?”

As a rule now, after cloning or editing major flows:

• Manually verify which version is active inside any external systems (check headers in webhook calls)
• Patch or rotate webhook URLs when archiving old versions
• Add alerting steps in “Beta” versions of Zaps so they call out if they activate unexpectedly

It’s not just a UX thing — the backend doesn’t validate duplicate webhooks across environments unless you’re using a team enterprise plan. Don’t trust the green dot.

4. Comments and descriptions only help if they survive cloning

A while back, I built a five-step Airtable-to-Slack automation that pulled in activities across team databases and added milestone summaries into project channels. I carefully wrote notes in every action step like, “This formula filters out archived records” and “Don’t delete: used in live reporting.”

Two weeks later, someone duplicated it for a different workspace and all comments got wiped. Zapier doesn’t carry descriptions over unless you clone inside the same folder and user role. Even then, if you rename a step, the comment sometimes disappears unless you click back and resave it. I tested it five ways — it’s totally inconsistent.

Fix: we now document automations upstream in our Notion automation registry, mapping out what each Zap does and linking directly to it. Messier, but at least metadata doesn’t get nuked by cloning. It also helps in cases where we hand the system off to a client and they use Make or n8n instead of Zapier — the logic still transfers.

5. Testing logic on live data breaks if filters rely on exact matches

This one got me on a client onboarding setup. I had a Zap that filtered Airtable records for exact matches in a multi-select field, like “Stage = Client – Active.” Worked fine in dev, broke immediately in prod. Turns out Airtable sometimes inserts a leading space if a user pastes in a value manually. So the filter fails silently; nothing runs.

Even worse: test runs in Zapier’s editor show results cleanly because they sample a different record where the field is structured cleanly. So tests look green. But live runs skip the logic entirely. There’s no error — it just doesn’t pass the filter.

“Zap ran successfully: 0 actions performed.”

I now normalize all inputs using Formatter steps before any filter. Sometimes I store a lowercase, hyphenated version of predictable values in a hidden column and filter against client_active instead of relying on written text. Not glamorous, but very hard to break.

6. Time-based triggers drift when daylight saving hits twice

One of our longest-lasting issues: twice a year our 8:00 AM daily Slack summary sends at 7:00 or 9:00, even though nothing’s changed. Scheduling in Zapier is based on browser-time when first created. If someone in UTC+1 builds it in March, and then DST hits, it shifts. If another user edits it later from UTC-5 and saves… yep, it shifts again.

The fix is not obvious. You have to set the Zap to run in a specific timezone in your Zapier profile settings, but that only applies to your edits. If a team member changes anything, their settings override silently. It’s not collaborative. It doesn’t even warn you.

We gave up and now use Google Calendar + webhook to trigger these kinds of time-based Zaps. It respects timezone explicitly and handles DST properly. That requires more setup but has worked every time since.

7. Make scenarios and Zapier Zaps fight for webhook priority

One of the weirder debugging moments: both a Zap and a Make scenario were listening to the same webhook URL because someone reused a custom endpoint across platforms. What happens is the first platform to receive the webhook might block or rate-limit the other. There’s no clear winner, it’s race-condition hell.

In our case, Make was intercepting a payload 70% of the time and Zapier got the rest. Result: intermittent Slack alerts and ghost updates in a CRM that couldn’t be linked back to anything predictably.

We fixed this by pushing all webhooks through a lightweight Cloudflare Worker that distributes the payload to both Make and Zapier. Now both get it cleanly — plus it gives us logging.

addEventListener("fetch", event => {
  event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})

async function handleRequest(request) {
  const payload = await request.text()
  await fetch(ZAPIER_URL, { method: "POST", body: payload })
  await fetch(MAKE_URL, { method: "POST", body: payload })
  return new Response("OK")
}

This feels like something both platforms should warn you about, but they don’t. We learned the hard way.