Welcome @Joel Rumney !

Your automators look correct. This might sound like a silly question but does the status still say “Send client requests” after a refresh of the page? I’ve noticed sometimes there is a delay in the status updating after requests are sent.

Are there any other automators in the workflow that could be interfering with this set of automators? Were the tasks in the previous section checked off before the request was sent? In other words, did the fourth automator trigger before the first three?

Thanks for your quick response @jens! 

Yes, the status still says ‘send client requests’ after a page refresh. I caught on to the page refresh thing early, thankfully!

Good 2nd question about whether the previous section was checked off first. We’ll test this out and report back.

HI @Joel Rumney, from your photo it seems like the automation did change the status of your work item to ‘Waiting on Client’.

I’m curious what your timeline looks like. Can you see on the work timeline that the status was changed? Was the status changed back for some reason? It’s possible you have a circular automation somewhere.

Some general advice and preferences regarding automations:

• I like keeping automations to their section. This helps only with simplicity and understanding. For instance, in this client request section, you have three automations referring to the previous section and the last one referring to this section. I like to keep the automation referring to the previous section in the previous section. Makes no difference in how they work, but I think it’s easier to understand and follow.
• I also prefer to use statuses that are informative instead of directive (I would use ‘Ready to Send Client Requests’ instead of ‘Send Client Requests’
• If your team uses Karbon by checking off all the tasks in a section, that’s great. I have experienced automation issues when staff change the status of a work item without checking off tasks within a work item. I prefer to have automations fire based on ‘All the tasks completed in this section’ but just make sure your team is doing it that way.
• If you are using email tasks (not client requests, but email-type tasks), there is a logo over the checkbox which often gets skipped by staff in my firm. If you are using email tasks, you may want to provide extra education/reminders about checking off the task or use work status triggers instead of task list section triggers.

There are lots of excellent Karbon users in this community, so I’m curious what else they would offer as advice to you.

Thanks @max this is helpful. I just noticed the logo/icon over the checkbox for email tasks - I didn’t realize the box was there.

Here are the last 4 items on the timeline. Looks like the status first changed to ‘sent to client’, then changed to ‘send client requests’. Perhaps in this case the boxes in the previous section weren’t ticked as completed as @jens mentioned. We’re testing it out now to see...

Ah. As I suspected. Your automation worked, but another automation came behind it and changed the status back. It’s possible you have a checklist item in the section above that says “Now send the client request to the client” which your staff left unchecked until after they sent the client request, so the last automations to run were the ones associated with the section above since your staff may have checked the box on their task after sending the client requests.

You can discover this (and a lot of other fun things) by watching your staff complete work without giving them any additional instruction. Just watch and see how they follow the instructions in the work item after you have designed it.

@jens and @max you were both right! We tested our template, the issue is the boxes in the step before the client request not being ticked as completed before sending the client request. Turns out the order of steps in the process are important, who knew? 

Thanks again for your help!