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Salesforce Flow Hacks to Deploy Immediately

There’s no doubt you have heard about Salesforce flows. Well, if you didn’t know, this is the automation tool of the future. It is soon becoming the one-stop-shop for declarative automation on Salesforce’s platform. It is a very powerful tool that any organization should deploy in its operations. Salesforce flows allows you to automate business processes without writing a code. It is not just an admin tool, it brings unity between admins and Salesforce developers by permitting the deployment of Lightning Web Components (LWC) and Apex, and allowing admins to perform everything in a single platform. There has also been an evident unique collaboration between admins and developers, with both parties gaining some little knowledge about Development and administration.  Therefore, you need to be aware of the major Salesforce flow hacks to deploy immediately and the tips that will ensure such hacks become effective in your organization. When accurately orchestrated, Salesforce Flows will yield great results as you scale your business. Let’s dive in and discuss some of these hacks and best practices that you cannot ignore as we step into the future. 

Top 7 Salesforce Flow Hacks to Deploy Immediately

I have quite a number below. Keep reading to find out more.

Clear and Concise Flow Document. 

Flows documentation will enable your successor or your forgetful self in the future to remember and have a clear picture of the overall objective of the flow.  Let’s face it, the fate of the business cannot remain solely in your head forever. You are like to become engaged with other tasks in your Salesforce career with different organizations.  When you move on to the next job, your successors need to be properly informed about every detail in progress. Your documentation should clearly state the purpose of your Flow and how it achieves it. Further, it should provide a clear roadmap for the current admin or developer to do whatever they need to achieve.  Having a centralized repository for all Salesforce-related documentation that only authorized persons such as admins, developers, or consultants have access to is a plus.  It makes work easier for your company in case there’s a need for scale up or scale down while minimizing issues since every party involved should be able to quickly retrieve relevant documentation.  Lastly, for Flow elements that do not use standard terminology or terminologies that may change, make a clear description of what that specific element represents for easy reference in the future.

Avoid Hardcoding Logic, values, or IDs in Salesforce Flows

When you avoid Hardcoding the logic, values, or IDs you frequently use within Salesforce, you will help reduce maintenance of your Flow, Apex, and other automation within your Salesforce organization. Salesforce features such as Custom Metadata for frequently referenced IDs that may change over time will help you reduce the workload when updates come, as you will only have one asset to be updated rather than the several, Flows, Apex, and Validation Rules. Creating logic within your Flows means you will be able to scale your automation up and down as per the business requirements. 

Be careful of Nulls and Empty Variables.

This helps you to avoid causing unnecessary errors. Always keep tabs on null and empty values throughout your Salesforce to avoid using something absent. Especially when you use a Get records element, I would advise you to create a Decision of ensuring you have gathered all the variables you are anticipating to prevent causing errors. Lastly, always plan for every scenario when you are building a Salesforce Flow.

Develop Your Salesforce Flows in a sandbox First.

This is another top Salesforce flow hacks to deploy immediately that will help your organization.  Using a sandbox whenever you are designing and building a Salesforce Flow will help you avoid errors or malfunctions that may affect production data as these errors can be detected and fixed before deployment. We all know that with great power comes great responsibility. As a Salesforce admin or developer, you should have it in mind that at times Salesforce Flows can be extremely powerful, hence you will need to take huge responsibility when building them. Flows create as well as edit and delete records, mostly without your input as the user. Imagine, such an automated power being built wrongly and deleting information from your Salesforce org. Your Flows would have done you more harm than good. This is why I cannot overemphasize the importance of building and testing your Flows in the sandbox environment to make sure they are correctly functioning before you forward them into your production environment.

Use Salesforce Flows Before Apex (Clicks, Not Code)

Salesforce Flows are highly intuitive and can become extremely useful in getting things done easily and quickly. Moreover, they are cheaper to maintain as compared to Apex code, making them a more cost-efficient option for your organization. In the effort to reduce technical debt in their Salesforce org, Salesforce recommends a ‘Clicks’ rather than a “code” approach to development. Technical debt is the term used to describe the buildup of code and other technology that is hard and costly to maintain. This makes it even harder for businesses to scale their solutions to a rapidly evolving business. Companies that have adopted the Clicks approach have designed their business automation in a manner that will reduce the amount of code required.

Creation of Scalable Complex Salesforce Flows Using Invokable Actions and Sub flows.

Talking of Salesforce flow hacks to deploy immediately, this is one of the hacks you can leverage on and make sure works pretty simple. If you find yourself rebuilding a lot of functionality in the Salesforce Flows you create, consider coming up with a Sub-Flow that can utilize multiple Flows to save you time. A Sub-flow is a smaller Flow that performs common tasks, such as collecting credit information or authorization of a credit card purchase. Another way you can enhance your Salesforce Flows with reusable components is by creating an invokable Apex that can be called from your Flows and apply these in multiple places. With Salesforce’s preference of clicks to codes approach in mind, only go for invokable Apex when the functionality cannot be achieved via a Sub-flow. 

Learn How to Use Different Kinds of Flows.

Salesforce Flows possess a significantly smaller but quite extensive learning curve compared to Apex. You only need to get the basics right, thereafter, you will find it quite valuable and interesting to learn how to create all the other types of flows available to you. The five types of Flows include, Screen Flows, schedule Triggered Flows, Record Triggered Flows, Platform Event-Triggered Flows, and Auto-launched Flows.

Wrap Up

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