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Understanding Workflow Part 2: Evaluation Criteria: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/829733
Workflow is an older version of automation that Salesforce is phasing out. These instructions are still available to you for updating existing Workflows, but new automation should be built with Process Builder or Flow.
Workflow rules are used in PatronManager to automate updates or notifications and optimize efficiency! There are four main parts of a workflow rule:
- Object ("what")
- Evaluation Criteria ("when")
- Rule Criteria ("why")
- Actions ("what now?")
This article will look at the second part of a workflow rule: evaluation criteria. Evaluation criteria constitutes the "when" of the workflow rule.
Workflow falls under Salesforce Administration and is therefore outside the scope of PatronManager support services. If you have questions or need assistance, reach out in the Client Community or reference Salesforce's resources.
There are three options for evaluation criteria:
Option 1: Created
This option is fairly straightforward. This tells the system to evaluate the rule only once: when the record is first created. This criteria ignores updates to existing records.
Example 1
You could use this evaluation criteria to trigger a workflow rule when a new Contact is created. You'd probably want to specify in your rule criteria that the record type of the contact should not be TBQ contact, which is the temporary record type that To Be Qualified records fall under.
Option 2: Created, and every time it's edited.
This option tells the system to evaluate the rule criteria each time a record is created or updated. This option seems self-explanatory but can definitely cause some confusion. With this option, the record is evaluated when it is first created (straightforward). The tricky part is in the "every time it's edited" clause. This means that every time the record is edited, the workflow rule will fire, as long as the edited record meets the rule criteria. The workflow rule will fire even if it already fired for that record when it was created or on a previous edit.
NOTE: You cannot add time-dependent actions to a rule if you select this option. Learn more about actions here.
Example 2
To illustrate this evaluation criteria option, let's look at a bad example first!
The Development Director wants to be notified of donations whose value is > $5,000. If a donation record has an initial value of $7,500 when created, the rule would fire and because the workflow criteria is met, and an alert would be sent to the Development Director. Now, if in a week, the Stage on that donation record is changed from "Prospecting" to "Proposal Sent", because the record changed, the rule is re-evaluated, and because the value is still $7,500 the rule criteria is met and another alert is sent to the Development Director. Obviously we don't want to keep sending alerts to the Development Director since they have already been notified, so this wouldn't be a good choice.
A better use case for this evaluation criteria would be if the Development Director wants to know if the Amount on a donation record is changed. This way, if a workflow rule is setup to test if the Donation Amount has changed, the evaluation rule would run the workflow rule every time the record changes. But the rule would only send out an alert to the Director when the workflow rule evaluates "True" i.e. the donation amount has changed. Curious about how to define that change in your Rule criteria? Check out this article.
Option 3: Created, and any time it’s edited to subsequently meet criteria
The last option tells the system to evaluate the rule for records that are created (and meet the criteria) or for existing records that are changed from not meeting the criteria to meeting the criteria.
With this option, the rule can run multiple times per record, but it won’t run when the record edits are unrelated to the rule criteria, unlike option 2.
Example 3
It sounds like the bad example from Option 2 would work much better with this evaluation criteria! Let's talk through it:
So the Development Director wants to be notified about gifts valued at $5,000 or more. Using Option 3, they will be notified when a donation is entered into the system in the amount of $6,200. If that donation amount is changed from $6,200 to $6,500, the workflow will not fire again because the record has already met the rule. If the reverse happened, and the gift amount was changed from $6,200 to $4,800, nothing will fire because the record does not meet the rule criteria. If the record is changed from a value less than $5,000 to a value >=$5,000, then the workflow will fire and the Development Director will receive a new alert.
To summarize!
In general, you would use Option 2 for field updates, because you're typically making sure some value is populated, and you want to check every time the record is edited. Nearly every other situation most often uses Option 3.