I wanted to share a small system thing I came up with - it is probably common but I thought I would give back in case it’s helpful to someone starting out. If you are on a plan that allows you to create tasks then you can do this. At the time of writing I think that’s a Pro plan upwards.
Tasks make it possible to automate parts of the system. So that means creating new records on a schedule and/or sending emails. The problem is that you can’t easily create tasks and send emails at the same time. So, if you wanted to create a task that would create a new record for a table, unless you have some conditional logic in there, it’s going to create one for every record, and then when it completes it won’t send an email once complete.
In my workflow I wanted knack to create records and then email the person that was going to have to do the work. But to do that upon completion of the task.
In the following example you can see how I used a Multiple Choice field on a new Table I created called “Mailer - Reports” that would be used as an automailer when certain conditions were met.
In this way I can create as many individual mailers as I want, and because they only fire on a single record I don’t have any problems with it cycling through every record in a table.
With this I can now setup tasks in other tables that are part of my production workflow - for example creating new records on a certain date, and then use this Task mailer to send an email reminder to the person(s) who need to take action on it.
By adding new multiple choice options you can cleanly build your task based email reminder automation pretty easily.
Screens below to show how I did this (it’s not hard!).
Oops forgot a bit!
After you have setup the above make sure to create one record for each different drop-down field. Only do one otherwise it will send two emails!
I could avoid this if in the future Tasks were augmented so that you could add a piece of logic to a task with a checkbox that says
“After this task has fully completed send email” which then allows you to drop an email automation on task completion. Or individual “After each step has been completed send email” (this would mean that the email would be sent out for every table the tasks cycles through rather than at the job end - first scenario).