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 recipe has a trigger, a condition, and an action (or multiple actions). Let's look at an example of a recipe: "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 recipe 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

Click on your automation center located on the upper right of your screen:

Access Automation Centre.png

Next, click on "Create Custom Automation":

Create Custom Automation.png

Once done, you should see the recipe below:

Create Automation Recipe.png

Now time to customize! 🎉

Choose a trigger

The first step in building your custom automation is to pick a trigger from the dropdown list. A trigger can involve a column from your board (i.e. Status, Person, Date, etc.) or an action that happens on your board (i.e. item created, item moved to group, etc.). For this example, we've chosen "When status changes":

Create an Automation from scratch.gif

We then select which Status column we would like to automate on our board:

Create an Automation- Status Column.gif

Select a condition

Depending on the trigger you've picked in step 1, 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...

Automation- Status Dependency.png

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 pick an action. A list of all the possible actions you can choose will display in a dropdown list, as below:

Create an Automation- Notify Someone.gif

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 design status changes to "Done", we want to notify someone. By clicking on "notify", you can customize your notification message:

Automation Notification message.png

Finally, we will pick the person we would like to notify. It can be several people or teams. It is totally customizable and up to you to decide. 😃

Automations select someone.gif

Tip: If you'd like to use "create a sub item" 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.

Automation notifications

You have the option to receive notifications when the automation is activated and then completes an action on your behalf. The notification will only appear for the user who triggered the automation that performed the action. For example, if the automation is set to move an item to a different group when you change the Status column, you will only see the notification if you make the change to the Status column.

These notification will appear in your "bell" icon:

Automations in action .gif

If you wish to turn off the notifications, you can deactivate them in monday.labs. Deactivating the notifications will only apply to your use of monday.com. Each individual user needs to activate the monday.labs feature to remove the notifications during their use of the platform.

To access monday.labs, open the main menu by clicking on your profile photo in the top right-hand corner of your screen. From there, click on monday.labs under "Explore" on the right side of the menu, and choose to deactivate automation notification:

Automations deactivate notifications.gif

That's it! You will no longer see the notifications.

Save it as a template

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

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

Automations create template .gif

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

Custom Automation Template in Centre.png

Duplicate your automation

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

Automation duplicate.png

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", you'll have the resulting copy of your automation 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.

New developments

We're working to create new automation blocks all the time. Here are a few recent developments:

Groups condition

We've made automations even more powerful by making actions conditional. You can now easily customize an automation so that the action only applies to a specific group. This makes it easier to build out your workflow in a more complex and efficient way.

Automated calculation

Create a trigger that automatically increases or decreases a number by a specified value. This automation block can help you to save time and minimize human error. One great way to use this? If you estimate time spent on projects or tasks, you can automatically move the needle if you're suddenly stuck or delayed.

Your opinion matters

We would love to hear your feedback about this feature! We would also love to know which specific recipe you'd like to create in your board. Feel free to fill out this form. 😊 You can also click on "Give Feedback" icon at the top right of the automation builder:

Automations Give Feedback.png