6 min read

Feature

Take your workflow a step further with the custom automation builder! This amazing feature allows you to create your own automation flow. Create new combinations tailored to your team's needs and make them fit perfectly into your specific workflow! 🙌

Learn the lingo 

Every custom automation template has a trigger, a condition, and an action (or multiple actions). Let's look at an example of a template:  "When a status changes to something, delete the item".

In this case, the trigger is "When a status changes".

The condition is "to something" because the trigger is conditional upon what you select for "something".

The action is "delete the item".

Every time that an item is deleted, one action is used. If you were to trigger this template three times, three items would be deleted and that would count as three actions used.

To learn more about actions and pricing, check out the Automation and Integration Actions article.

How to access custom automations

To access the Automation center, click on the Automate button located on the upper right of your screen:

Next, click on Create from scratch: 

Once done, you should see the template below: 

Now it's time to customize!

Choose a trigger

The first step in building your custom automation is to choose a trigger from the dropdown list. A trigger can involve a column from your board (like Status, Person, Date, etc.) or an action that happens on your board (like item created, item moved to group, and so on).

For this example, we've chosen "When status changes". We then select which Status column we would like to automate on our board:

Select a condition

Depending on the trigger you've chosen in the previous step, you will then need to select a condition. In this example, we want to trigger an action when the status column changes to "Done". To accomplish this, we will select the condition "Done" from the dropdown list.

Note: The labels displayed correspond to the labels of the status column selected from your board.

Pick an action

Now that the first part of our automation is created, we need to choose an action. A list of all the possible actions you can choose will display in a dropdown list, as shown below:

Tip:  You can add a number of additional conditions by clicking on the "+" icon to the right of the automation. 

In this example, when the status changes to "Done", we want to notify someone. By clicking on notify, you can customize the notification message:

Finally, it's time to select the person we would like to notify. You can choose to notify several people or teams. It is completely customizable and up to you to decide.

Tip:  If you'd like to use "create a subitem" as one of your actions, you must set up the subitem column on the board first.

If "notify Me" fails for any reason, the actions following "notify Me" will still run unless they are dependent on "notify Me". 

Once you are happy with your custom automation, click the blue Create Automation button to add the automation to your board.

Save it as a template

You can save your own custom template as a template and make it available for anyone to use in your monday.com account.

To do so, navigate to the Automation center on the board where you've created your custom automation. Click on the three-dot menu to the right of the automation and then on Save as template. You can then name the template and click on the blue Create Template button as below:

And you are done! You will find your custom automation in the Automation center within the category Custom templates as below:

Duplicate your automation

In order to help build more complex workflows in a quick and efficient manner, you can duplicate your custom automations To do so, click on the three-dot menu to the right of your custom automation and select Duplicate.

A copy of the selected automation will open in the custom automation builder, allowing you to edit it as you wish. Once you click Create automation, a copy of your automation will be ready to go!

Note: When duplicating a board with custom automations using integration blocks, such as Gmail, Outlook, or Slack, please note that these automations will not duplicate and carry over to the newly duplicated board. They must be recreated on the duplicate board. 

As always, we would love to hear your feedback! We would also love to know which specific template you'd like to create in your board. Feel free to fill out this form. You can also click on Feedback icon at the top right of the automation builder: