Build an Custom Automation - Archive workflow when completed

Keeping customer and sales workflows clean is essential for maintaining reliable data and reducing clutter in your workspace. An automated archive step ensures completed workflows don’t linger or confuse your team. With a simple automation, you can maintain data hygiene without relying on manual cleanup.

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Planhat

Designing your custom automation

In this guide, we’ll walk you through our framework to build a Custom Automation in Planhat. Each organisation will have their own specific needs, so use the framework to create an Automation that works for your business. **Step 1: Decide the outcome and goal** - **Outcome:** A clean, organized workspace where only active workflows are visible, and completed workflows are automatically archived.\ **Goal:** Reduce manual work, prevent workflow clutter, and ensure data hygiene across Sales, CS and PS by automatically archiving workflows when they reach a designated “completed” state. **Step 2: Identify the trigger** - When all tasks in a Workflow are marked as completed **Step 3: Decide the actions** - Archive the workflow and date-stamp it **Step 4: Test** Let's have a look at each of these steps in more detail.

Step 1: Decide the outcome and goal

First, let's define the problem and what you are trying to achieve with the automation. Without Automation, teams often forget to manually close or archive Workflows, which leads to messy data, inaccurate reporting, and difficulty tracking true sales progress, onboarding progress, or any professional services workflow. The purpose of this automation is to ensure that any workflow—whether in Sales, CS, or Implementation—is automatically archived upon completion. **Outcome:** A clean, organized workspace where only active workflows are visible, and completed workflows are automatically archived.\ **Goal:** Reduce manual work, prevent workflow clutter, and ensure data hygiene across Sales, CS, and PS by automatically archiving workflows when they reach a designated “completed” state.

Step 2: Identify the trigger

To archive a workflow reliably, the Automation needs to know **when** a Workflow is considered complete and **which Workflow** it should act on. This requires a clear trigger and minimal, but precise, data. **Trigger:** The most common trigger occurs when the **Workflow** status is **updated** to a specific state, such as “completed” or “done”. This is the moment that signals the workflow no longer needs active attention.

Tip! Ensure your team uses a single consistent "completion" status so the trigger is reliable. The Automation should run only when the Workflow reaches this final state—not before. In this case, we are using the system field on the Workflow object called **"Percentage done"** which calculates % of the tasks marked as completed.

If you only want to apply this Automation to certain Workflows, you can specify this in the Trigger filtration. In this case, we've filtered it to trigger only on the Workflow "Churn Prevention", but in general, we recommend keeping it active for all Workflows.

Step 3: Design the actions

Once the trigger fires and the Workflow is identified, the action is straightforward: archive it. For this to happen, you should add an **"update" action** on the **Object: Workflow**. The system fields that need to be populated are: **Id:**[[ <<object.\_id>>]]\ This guarantees you’re updating the right Company, the automation reads the [[companyId]] from the trigger record and applies the action to that Company. **Archieved** (toggle): Yes\ This archives the Workflow. **Archive date:** [[<<time.today>>]]\ This saves today's date, which can be useful for later TTV tracking. This ensures that completed Workflows are automatically moved out of active dashboards, keeping everyone focused on current work.

Step 4: Test and iterate

Before rolling this out broadly, run a few tests using sample Workflows. - Mark all tasks as completed and confirm the Automation archives it instantly. - Verify that active Workflows remain untouched and are not archived prematurely. - Review the logs under "Runs" to ensure the archive action is being executed properly. Small refinements during testing—like adjusting the trigger state or adding optional notes—help create a smooth, reliable experience for the team.

**Tip!** In the logs, you will see each step executed in the Automation in green or red. Green indicated that the step was successful, if it's red it indicates an error has occurred. Read more about troubleshooting an Automation in our Help Center [here](https://help.planhat.com/en/articles/9587341-automation-logs-and-troubleshooting).

Here you see the Automation in action!

**Tip!** If you want to take the automation to the next level, you can add a branch step and have it update the phase of the company depending on which workflow was archived. For example: If Onboarding workflow - update phase to adoption when archived

With this Automation in place, your workspace stays clean and your team stays focused. No clutter, no manual steps—just automatic data hygiene that works in the background.