Knowledge Base

Automation

If you find yourself repeating the same administrative tasks in Pipedrive – scheduling the same activity after a deal has been moved to a specific stage in your pipeline – then it might be in your company's interest to automate those tasks, so you can concentrate on the important things that make your business thrive.

Automations speed up your processes by automating tasks based on a trigger event chosen by you.

Automations in Pipedrive are made up of two parts – a trigger event and an action event.

• The trigger event is the “if” portion of an if-then equation: Before the automation occurs, this programmed action needs to occur.
  This can be the creation, updating, or deletion of a person, organization, activity, or deal in Pipedrive.
• The action event is the “then” part of an if-then equation: Once the trigger event has occurred, this is the action you wish to take place.
  This can be the creation, updating, or deletion of a person, organization, activity, or deal in Pipedrive, or the sending of an email from the email address synced to your Pipedrive account.

Creating an automation

To access the automation feature, click on the “...” (more) tab > Automations.

To begin creating an automation, click the “+ Add automation” button, found in the upper-right of the automation page.

Once clicked, provide a name (and description, if helpful) for your intended automation – don’t worry, this name can be edited later – and click “Save”.

To begin designing your automation, click the “Add trigger” button. You will see a sidebar where you can choose the item and event that will trigger your automation.

When configuring your trigger, you can choose between six options – deal, person, activity, lead, organization, and project – with three options of what event relating to that item will trigger the automation – creation, updating, or deletion.

Once you have chosen the trigger type and the trigger event, click the “Apply trigger” button.

With the trigger event in place, you will then have an option to apply a condition (or conditions) to your trigger. Here, you can define under what circumstances your automation will trigger.

After saving your condition, click on the plus sign "+" to choose your next step. This can be another condition or your action event.

When defining your action, you can choose between default options – person, organization, lead, deal, activity, email, notes, campaigns and project – as well as integrations – Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello and Asana. You are able to choose action types that are specific to each option.

You can add multiple actions to your automation and they will always be executed from the top and work down the list. E.g., Step 3 will only be executed after step 2 is done.

However, note that automations will check only once if the condition for every triggered action is met unless you use the wait until event condition. If a condition of a specific action is not met, the action won’t be executed and the system will not execute the next step.

Here you can see how you would set up an automation that would move your new deal to a different pipeline depending on the deal owner.

To specify which users are allowed to trigger this automation, check the option at the top the automation and select which option you would prefer.

Once you have made all of your choices and designed your automation, click the “Save” button to finalize your automation.

Once you save your automation, it will be listed on the automation list view.

Automation list view

You may also view all of your created automations along with the automations that have been created for the entire company’s Pipedrive account, sort by updated time and apply filters.

You may edit, delete, or mark automations as active or inactive. If an automation is marked as inactive, the trigger and action functions will not occur.

Inactive automations are grayed out to allow you to quickly understand which automations are currently active in your Pipedrive account.

Learn more about the automation list view in this article.

Transfer automations

Whether a user is leaving the company or just taking time off, it may be necessary for another user to have access to their automations to troubleshoot or assign them to someone else. This can be done by transferring existing automations.

Users and permissions

Only the following types of users are able to transfer automations:

• Global app admin users
• Deals app admin users
• Global regular users with the permission ”Add automations”

Transfer ownership

On the list view, click on the automation you want to transfer to open the automation preview. Then, click ”...” and “Transfer ownership”.

Here you will be able to select the user you want to transfer the automation to.

Before finishing the transfer, you’ll see a disclaimer with a list of events that will happen once the automation is transferred. The events in the disclaimer may vary depending on the automation steps (e.g., if there are pending executions active, if an integration is installed and used in an automation). Make sure to read this disclaimer carefully before proceeding.

In the disclaimer prompt you’re able to cancel pending executions for that automation. If you check the box, any pending executions will be canceled and not executed. E.g., if the automation is configured to send an email 5 days after a trigger and those executions are still in progress, they will be canceled and the email will not be sent.

Once the automation is transferred, it will appear in the list view of automations of the receiving owner. The automation is transferred in an inactive state, so the receiving owner is able to review the automation and do any troubleshooting if required.

The automation will have a transferred label added to indicate that it has been transferred.

The receiving owner is now able to configure the automation – including editing and activation.