Using Rollup Helper For Your Workflow

A great way to use Rollup Helper is to combine the target fields that Rollup Helper calculates with workflow rules. For example, when projects go over budget or are delayed, you will want to have access to this information at the project level to use in a workflow rule.

One area where we have seen customers take advantage of this is project management. When you combine Rollup Helper + workflow + your project management system, you'll enable a smarter and more organized workflow within Salesforce. With Rollup Helper, your workflow can now be based on ALL your critical data changes, whether that data is text, a picklist value, numbers, formulas, or currencies.

In this use case, we're going to setup Rollup Helper to track a project schedule. Let's say you have a Deadline on each project for when the project team planned the project to finish. Let's also assume that you want to have an Expected Finish Date on each project to track the latest expected finish date for the project. With Rollup Helper, you can configure Salesforce to look at all the dates in your work breakdown structure (milestone deadline dates in this case) and get the latest milestone deadline date and place it into your Expected Finish Date field on the Project. Here is the Rollup Setting required for this use case below:

When the Rollup Setting above is run by Rollup Helper, the Expected Finish Date on your project page will recalculate.

Because Rollup Helper target fields are just custom fields, you can embed them into workflows (or even validation rules). Here is an example of the workflow rule and workflow action we created for this scenario. When Rollup Helper updates the Expected Finish Date, this workflow rule will evaluate to see if the new Expected_Finish_Date__c value is greater than the Deadline__c field. If it is, a new "Your Project Is Late" task gets created.

Finally, here is the task that gets created in this scenario.