Now, I’m not going to take you through everything about Flows in this blog, but I am going to tell you which Flow you can use to replace the automations that you would usually have built using Workflows and Process Builder.
When people mention Flows to anyone other than a developer, traditionally, everyone goes running in the opposite direction. With Workflows and Process Builder being retired in 2023, we can’t have that same reaction anymore!
The Flow we are going to look at is the Autolaunched Flow with a Record Trigger. These Flows launch when a record triggers them. This could be a record being created, updated or even deleted (something Workflows and Process Builder couldn’t do). Something happens on the record, and the Flow is launched to then to perform the automation.
Let’s have a look at how to build one of these Flows ourselves. On our Accounts, we have a field called Upsell Opportunity. The requirement is when the Upsell Opportunity picklist field is set to Yes or Maybe, then a Task is created to contact the customer about that upselling Opportunity.
The Flow itself is very easy to build, and you will notice the process is actually very similar to creating a Workflow or Process.
- Selecting a Record Triggered Flow
- Choose the Object that you would like to start the Automation,
- Choose the Evaluation Criteria
Next set the entry criteria so that if the Upsell Opportunity picklist field value is Maybe or Yes, the Task should be created.
For the optimise options, we are going to choose the Actions and Related Records, as we want a Task to be created, which is an Action.
You’ve now created the starting node, and we have told the Flow what it needs to look for, we now need to tell it what to do when a record meets the criteria.
Drag an Action Node onto the canvas. There are a lot of different actions that we can execute using Flows, from sending emails to posting to Chatter! In this scenario, choose the Task option from the side bar and then search for New Task in the Action bar.
Give the Action a label and fill in all the details about the Task, you may need to create resources to fill in the details of your task. You can create resources either before you create the action, or whilst you are on the action.
Once the action has been created, join the 2 nodes up so that they are connected. You can see when we do this there is the option to put in a schedule, just like there was with Workflows and Processes.
We can now save the flow and go and test it out. Don’t forget to activate it!
Now, when we go to one our records and change their upselling opportunity field to either Yes or Maybe, a task will be created to remind us to follow up on that opportunity.
Using Record Triggered Flows doesn’t just allow you to create Tasks; you can also use them to send emails, update fields, or as we said before, perform actions around deleting records as well. Although they look a little bit scary at first, they follow a lot of the same steps as creating Workflows and Processes and they make a worthy replacement.