Build an Custom Automation - Time stamp milestones in customer journey

Capturing milestone dates in a customer journey is essential for proving Time to Value (TTV) and understanding how efficiently customers progress through onboarding and adoption. Yet most teams either track these dates manually—or not at all. With a simple automation, you can consistently timestamp milestones the moment they happen, ensuring accurate reporting and a clean customer timeline.

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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 complete and consistent record of milestone dates that supports clear TTV measurement and customer journey visibility\ **Goal:** Remove manual tracking, increase data accuracy, and give teams trustworthy signals that show how quickly customers are realizing value **Step 2: Identify the trigger** - The Automation should be triggered when a specific field changes that indicate a passed milestone **Step 3: Decide the actions** - Add custom fields to save date - Add Update step to populate the newly created date field **Step 4: Test** - Test and iterate until you are happy

Step 1: Decide the outcome and goal

One of the biggest gaps in both Sales and CS workflows is not knowing exactly when key milestones occur. Dates for milestones like onboarding started and completed, and the first Objective or Workflow completed, are often entered manually—or missed entirely—making it hard to measure Time to Value (TTV) or understand true customer progress. By automating milestone timestamps, you ensure these key moments are captured instantly and accurately. This creates a reliable customer timeline without adding extra work for your team. **Outcome:** A complete and consistent record of milestone dates that supports clear TTV measurement and customer journey visibility.\ **Goal:** Remove manual tracking, increase data accuracy, and give teams trustworthy signals that show how quickly customers are realizing value.

Step 2: Identify the trigger and inputs

To capture milestones effectively, the system needs clearly defined signals that represent the moment a milestone is achieved. These signals trigger the Automation and ensure the correct date is recorded. **Trigger:** The Automation should kick off when a specific field changes, it can be whatever you want to record, but some common examples are: [[Objective]] **updated** with conditions: **Status** equals **Complete** - This records when a objective is marked as completed **[[Company]] updated** with conditions: **Phase** equals **Onboarding** - This records when the Onboarding started **[[Company]] updated** with conditions: **Phase** equals **Adoption** - This records when the Onboarding is completed

These fields values are unique for each organization, so make sure to set it up so that it makes sense for you and your team.

Step 3: Design the actions

Once the Automation is triggered, it should record the timestamp quickly and cleanly. In order to save these dates you need to create custom fields for each milestone you want to save down. In this case, we have created following custom fields: On Company Object: - Onboarding date started - Onboarding date completed - Objective confirmed date You add these by going to Data Model - Company - + new field. Once those are created, add a **Update** step in the Automation flow with following configuration (see below):

Step 4: Test and iterate

Before rolling out across all customers, test each milestone trigger individually. - Update a customer’s phase to simulate “Onboarding Started” and confirm the date populates correctly. - Trigger a custom event (like first workflow triggered) and ensure the automation timestamps the correct field. - Check that the automation only updates the date **once**, even if the phase or event changes again. - Verify the correct company is being updated by inspecting the related company record. A quick round of tests ensures you’re recording accurate, high-quality milestone data before deploying widely.

You can also build a data table and add your newly created fields to find them easily. Here, I have created a data table at the Company level called TTV, that I can quickly open to view my portfolio milestones. You can also add these fields to the Company Profile list.

Here you can see the automation in action! When the phase is updated to Onboarding, it immediately triggers the timestamp to log the date.

By automating milestone timestamps, you give your organization a simple but powerful tool for measuring TTV and demonstrating value to customers without extra manual work. Set it up once, and your customer journey becomes clearer and easier to measure from day one.