Knowledge Base

Getting started with Automations

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

• The trigger event represents the “if” part of an if-then statement: For the automation to run, a specific action must occur first.
  This action could involve creating, updating, or deleting a person, organization, activity, or deal in Pipedrive. Alternatively, you can use a date trigger, which will initiate the automation based on a specified date, such as a contract renewal or event deadline.
• The action event represents the “then” part of an if-then statement: Once the trigger event occurs, this is the step that defines what the automation will do in response.
  This action can include automatically creating, updating, or deleting a person, organization, activity, or deal in Pipedrive. Additionally, it can involve sending an email from the email address synced to your Pipedrive account.

Creating your first automation

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

To begin creating an automation, click the “+ Automation” button at the top left of the automation page.

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

When configuring your trigger, you can choose between “Event trigger” and “Date trigger”.

The event trigger provides you with six entity options (deal, person, activity, lead, organization, and project), each with three types of events that will trigger the automation (added, updated, or deleted).

The date trigger provides you with four entity options (deal, person, activity, and organization), each with options to choose the specific date field, and three parameters (exact date, before date, and after date) to trigger the automation.

For more information on date triggers, check out this article.

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

With the trigger event in place, you’ll then have the option to apply a condition (or conditions) to your trigger. Here, you can define the circumstances under which 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, projects and webhooks – as well as integrations – Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello and Asana. You’re able to choose action types that are specific to each option.

You can add multiple actions to your automation, and they’ll always be executed from the top and work down the list. For example, 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 won’t execute the next step.

Here, you can see how to set up an automation that moves 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 of 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 the automations you created alongside the ones 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 won’t occur.

Inactive automations are grayed out, allowing you to quickly understand which 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, another user may need access to their automations for troubleshooting purposes or to assign them to someone else. This can be done by transferring the ownership of existing automations.

Users and permissions

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

• Global app admin users can transfer any automation to themselves or to any other global app admins
• Deals app admin users and global regular users with the permission ”Add automations” can transfer their own automations to global app admins

Transfer ownership

Single transfer

Open the automation preview. When hovering over the owner’s name on the left, click the pencil icon, or click ”...” on the right and “Transfer ownership.”

Bulk transfer

On the Automations view, mark the checkboxes of the automations you want to transfer on the left-hand side of your screen.

Then, click “Transfer ownership”.

When clicking on “Transfer ownership,” you must select the user to whom you want to transfer the automation.

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 (for example, 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 can cancel pending executions for that automation. If you check the box, all pending executions will be canceled and won‘t be 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’ll be canceled, and the email won’t be sent.

Once the automation is transferred, it will appear in the receiving owner’s automations list view. The transferred automation is deactivated, so the receiving owner can review and troubleshoot it if necessary.

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 activating.