Manual document follow-up is easy to miss when reviews, updates, and handoffs depend on people remembering every step. Document automations handle routine work for you, so the right actions happen at the right time. You can update fields, add comments or to-dos, and notify the team as documents move through your workflow. That gives you a more consistent process and more time for work that needs judgment.
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Overview
Workspace owners can create automation rules that run when a document is created, updated, or remains in a status for a set amount of time. When the conditions are met, the rule updates a field, adds a comment, creates a to-do, or sends an email. This helps you handle routine follow-up consistently.
With the Aha! Knowledge Advanced plan, you can create automation rules for documents. For example, a rule can add a to-do or comment automatically when a document reaches a key stage in your workflow.
If you use Aha! Knowledge Advanced with the Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ plan, you can also create document automation rules for the following record types:
Initiatives
Releases
Epics
Features
Ideas
These automation rules create a document on the related record automatically. This helps you standardize research and documentation practices without asking every teammate to remember the right template or location. When an automation rule adds a document, that document appears on the record's Research tab. From there, the team can open it, add details, and link it with other research as needed.
Create a document automation rule
Follow these instructions to create automation rules based on documents. If you use Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ and want to create an automation rule for an initiative, relesase, epic, feature, or idea that creates a document as an action, review the Aha! Roadmaps article on automation rules.
Workspace owners in Aha! Knowledge Advanced can create document automation rules. To create an automation rule:
Navigate to User menu -> Settings -> Workspace -> Automation.
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Click Add rule to create an automation rule. From there, select Add documents rule to create a custom automation rule.
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Automation rules have three parts: triggers, conditions, and actions. Each rule starts with a trigger. If the trigger happens and all the conditions are met, then the actions you define will run automatically. Each rule has one trigger. There are three triggers to choose from:
Document is created
Document is created or updated
Document meets a time limit
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Use the menus to choose a trigger. The list of available fields will include both Standard and Custom fields (if you have any enabled for your workspace).
Add optional conditions to focus your automation rule — so it runs only when every condition has been met. Conditions apply to both Standard and Custom fields. You can add up to 10 conditions.
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Choose an Action. Each rule can have multiple actions, which all run simultaneously if the conditions are met and the rule triggers.
Select from the following actions:
Action |
Effect |
Update the field |
Update a field on the document that triggered the automation. Depending on the field in question, the rule can Add, Remove, or Clear predefined values, or allow you to choose a specific custom value. |
Send an email |
Send an email to one or more Aha! Knowledge users in your account. You can customize the email subject and body text. Each email will include a link back to the document that triggered the automation. |
Add a comment |
Add a comment to the document that triggered the automation. You can customize the comment and #mention other Aha! records. |
Add a to-do |
Add a to-do or workflow approval to the document that triggered the automation. Customize the to-do title and description, and #mention other Aha! knowledge documents. Assign the to-do to one or more users and set the due date for a specific time after the to-do is created. |
After you create your action, you can create another or click Save rule to save your rule.
Your rule will be disabled by default. If you want to enable your rule, check the Enabled checkbox next to the Save rule button.
Back in the User menu -> Settings -> Workspace -> Automations page, you can see a list of all the rules you have created, sorted alphabetically. The order of the rules does not matter — all rules run simultaneously, not sequentially.
Automation rules are workspace-specific. They can only be triggered in the workspace where you created them. This is because each workspace in your account may use different workflows, statuses, layouts, or custom fields. You can copy an automation rule and move it to another workspace, but you should make sure that it fits that workspace's settings before you enable it.
Time limit triggers
Create automation rules based on the amount of time a record spends in a specific status. This helps you move work along at the pace you desire by alerting you when a record has not progressed to the next status for a certain amount of time.
For example, let's say you want to review all new ideas within one week of their submission in your ideas portal. You can set an automation rule that will add a to-do for the idea assignee if it has been in a Needs review status for 6 days.
To use time-based automation, choose the Meets a time limit trigger when creating your new automation rule. Enter the number of days and select a status from the dropdown to create your trigger. Add a condition when necessary, create your action, and save your automation rule.
After saving your automation rule, records will trigger automation actions going forward for records that change to the selected status and meet the configured time limit.
Records that met your automation rule's configured time limit and status at the time the rule was created will not trigger automation actions.
Copy automation rules to another workspace
Automation rules depend on your workspace settings to run correctly. Across the workspaces in your account, you may have configured different workflows, statuses, layouts, or custom fields. Users may have different permissions in different workspaces as well. Because of this, each automation rule runs in the workspace where it was created, and workspaces cannot inherit automation rules from parent lines.
But this doesn't mean you need to manually recreate every automation rule in each workspace in your account. You can copy automation rules across workspaces in three steps.
First, navigate to User menu -> Settings -> Workspace -> Automation and hover over the rule you want to copy. Click Copy.
Second, after editing the copied rule to your liking, navigate back to All automation rules, hover over your copied rule, and click Move. Use the Choose workspace dropdown to select the workspace or parent line where you want to move the rule.
Third, navigate to the workspace where you moved your rule and confirm that it will still run as expected. Any workspace-specific fields in your new rule will be blank with a red border around them. Fill in the relevant information, Save your rule, and you're done!
View automation logs
Your automation rule will run as soon as it is first Enabled; automation rules are disabled by default. There are several ways to see your automation rule at work across your workspace:
Under the rule's title at the top of the page, you can see whether it has been enabled, and a count of how many times your rule has run since it was created.
At the top right of the page in the Rule configuration window, you can see an audit log of actions taken by your rule. Click View log messages to access the log. Red messages indicate errors, Yellow messages indicate warnings, and Blue messages indicate information.
In affected records' history, actions taken by an automation rule will show up as coming from Aha! automation.
Automated actions taken by a fixed workflow will also show up as coming from Aha! automation.