The Flow Setup section within Zoho Flow Settings provides access to five key configuration areas that extend the platform's capabilities beyond standard drag-and-drop automation. These tools allow you to build custom logic, manage authentication, parse incoming emails, connect on-premise systems, and maintain authorised links to external applications.

Custom Functions

Custom functions allow you to write Deluge code to handle logic that goes beyond what standard flow steps support. This includes complex calculations, data transformation, custom API calls, and specialised automation tasks that require programmatic control. Custom functions you create here become available as reusable steps within your flows.

• Write Deluge scripts to perform operations not available through native flow actions.
• Use custom functions for data transformation, conditional logic, and third-party API interactions.
• Functions can accept input parameters and return values for use in subsequent flow steps.

Auth Profiles

Auth profiles store authentication credentials for external applications, enabling you to create custom connections to services that are not natively supported by Zoho Flow. An auth profile defines how Zoho Flow should authenticate when communicating with a third-party service, and it is referenced by the outgoing webhook send action or custom app integrations.

• Supports various authentication types including API key, Basic Auth, OAuth 2.0, and custom header-based authentication.
• Auth profiles are particularly useful for integrating with unsupported third-party applications through webhook actions.
• Once created, auth profiles can be reused across multiple flows, reducing the need to re-enter credentials repeatedly.

Email Templates

Email templates are used when you want Zoho Flow to trigger automations based on incoming emails. Each template instructs the platform on how to parse an incoming message and extract specific pieces of data as variables. These variables are then passed into the flow for use in subsequent actions.

• Define parsing rules to extract fields such as sender name, subject line, or specific body content.
• Email templates are selected during the configuration of an Email trigger in a flow.
• Multiple templates can be created for different types of incoming emails, each with its own parsing logic.

On-Prem Agents

On-premise agents enable Zoho Flow to communicate securely with applications hosted on your own servers, rather than in the cloud. The agent acts as a bridge between your internal network and Zoho Flow, allowing flows to read from and write to on-premise databases, ERP systems, and other locally hosted software without exposing them directly to the internet.

• The on-prem agent requires a lightweight installation on a machine within your network.
• The agent connects outbound to Zoho Flow, so no inbound firewall rules are required.
• Multiple agents can be configured if your organisation has more than one on-premise environment.

Connections

Connections are authorised links between Zoho Flow and individual app accounts. When a flow needs to read or write data in an application, it does so through a connection that holds the relevant access token or credentials. Both native Zoho Flow integrations and custom applications created via auth profiles are managed through the Connections list.

• Each connection is tied to a specific user account within an application, such as a particular Zoho CRM or Slack workspace login.
• Connections can be shared across flows, so you only need to authorise an app once.
• If a connection becomes invalid (for example, when a user's OAuth token expires), any flows using it will fail until the connection is re-authorised.
• The Connections page shows the status of each link, making it easy to identify and resolve authentication issues.