by Guest Contributor | Jun 23, 2026 | Feature focus
Article by Sean Judd, Product Integration Specialist at Award Force
If you’re running an awards program, chances are you’re always on the lookout for ways to work smarter. You might already be using entry statuses to sort entries quickly, or relying on moderation to filter out unsuitable entries before they reach your judges. Maybe you’ve set up sponsorships to keep the financial side organised. Overall, things are running smoothly.
But once you’ve repeated the same task enough times, the urge to automate becomes hard to ignore. Using data you already have on hand, you can build integrations that take repetitive work—and the risk of human error—off your plate for good.
It’s easy to feel daunted at this stage. The possibilities can seem endless, and knowing where to start isn’t always obvious. The trick is to pick one problem, solve it properly, and build outward from there. Nobody nails the perfect process on the first attempt.
Below are a few time-saving integrations within Award Force that can lighten your workload and tighten up your process.
The copy entry integration lets you duplicate entries. Say, for instance, my awards program has a handful of niche categories that never appear on the entry form, because I’d rather decide who belongs in them based on what’s actually in the entry, not leave it up to entrants to guess.
Once an entry comes in, I tag it with whichever hidden category fits, and the copy entry integratin automatically creates a duplicate. No asking entrants to second-guess where they belong, and no manual re-entry on my end. I could even add a qualifying round first, where judges review entries and tag them with the category they’d recommend, before the copy is triggered.
That’s one small problem solved. Next, we need a way to decide which entries are worth copying; an AI field can help with that.
Here’s how: set up an AI field on a hidden tab, then write a prompt that scores each entry against your criteria. It takes some trial and error, tweaking the prompt until the scores feel right, but once you’re happy with it, the AI field will score every entry automatically as it’s submitted.
To squeeze out a bit more efficiency, we surface the AI field’s score directly in the Entries view, then tag any entry scoring 70 or above so the copy process kicks in automatically.
Just like that, a couple of small tweaks have cut down our workload and made life easier for our judges.
What’s more, solving that first problem has opened up new possibilities. Now that entries are scored automatically, those scores can feed into other decisions further down the line.
For more tricks on how to save time in your workflow, have a look at these Awards management tips for busy people.
Say our awards program accepts entries in several languages. A DeepL or Google Translate integration can handle that for us, and we can be selective about it too. Using a tag as the trigger, we only translate text that actually needs it, perhaps relying on a separate AI field to identify the language first. For example, an entry might get tagged “French” once the AI field scores it 70 or higher and detects French as the language. Anything scoring below 70 skips translation entirely, saving us from racking up unnecessary translation costs.
If our awards program asks entrants to submit an essay or motivational letter, we might want a clearer picture of whether AI played a role in writing it. That’s where a Copyleaks integration comes in – its probability score gives us another data point to factor into our decision-making.
When it comes to accepting entry payments, integrating with Xero can take a lot of the manual accounting work off our hands. Every time an entrant pays their entry fee, a corresponding invoice gets generated in Xero for that entry, and once it’s reconciled there, the entry’s status updates automatically back in Award Force.
It might look like an intricate, multi-layered system from the outside, but really, it’s just the result of solving one problem at a time and building on each success.
Each time we cracked one challenge, we went looking for the next chance to shave off time, tighten up consistency, or cut back on manual work, chaining each solution to the last.
Complexity isn’t what makes an integration valuable. What matters is whether it saves you time on repetitive work or brings more consistency to your process, so you’re not stuck manually sorting and updating entries, and can instead focus on the projects and winners that matter most.
Pick one problem, solve it properly, and build from there. You might be surprised how fast those small wins add up to real time saved.
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