Salesforce Flow Best Practices: 5 Ways to Hack Productivity

There’s no question about it – Flow is great! I love it, I’m sure you do too, and it’s slowly becoming the cornerstone of Salesforce declarative automation. 

Here are five key tips to hack productivity with Salesforce Flow…

Tip 1: Why Salesforce Chrome Extension

This one actually extends far beyond Salesforce Flow – the Why Salesforce extension for Google Chrome allows you to customize your Salesforce Setup menu tabs just like any other Lightning App. 

I have never understood why we’re not able to do this by default – Setup is where a lot of Salesforce Admins live. It makes sense that you’d want to add quick links to frequently used menus! 

You can add the Why Salesforce Chrome extension to your browser here.

Tip 2: Login Flows

Did you know that you’re able to configure a Flow to automatically fire during a user’s login authentication process? This is particularly helpful for external users as you’re able to get them to read and accept the terms and conditions of working together and gather specific information about them before giving them access to your Salesforce environment. 

You can also use a Visualforce page (hence the “Type” value in the screenshot above), although this probably isn’t recommended; it’s best to use a Screen Flow instead. One major caveat is that whatever Login Flow you configure for a Profile applies to everyone within that Profile. This means that if you’ve got only a small number of Profiles, you’ll need to be thoughtful about how you build out your Flows.

To read more about Login Flows, you can read the Salesforce Help article here. 

Tip 3: Consider All Possibilities

You may design your Flows according to your “golden path”, but this isn’t always what happens when it goes into production. Users may incorrectly populate data, data that the Flow tries to query is not there, or the records that the Flow tries to meet an error because of a Validation Rule or another process.

For this reason, you should brainstorm all the possible outcomes when using your Flow and ensure you’re prepared for when each comes. 

Consider Murphy’s Law – anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It’s better to be prepared and ensure you’re covering all your bases than to not and realize you should have.

Tip 4: Use Code

You may be wondering why I’m suggesting code in place of Flow in an article about Flow tips. Ultimately, I’m not suggesting that you write code instead of use a Flow, but rather in conjunction with Flow. 

If you’re looking to perform some more complex process automation (or have a need for a key/value map collection type), you can consider handing off to Apex for a section of your Flow using invocable Apex. Essentially, you’d be creating your own custom Flow Action. You can write your own custom components as well, and choose to either embed these in Screen Flows or as Actions.

If you’d like to learn more about invocable Apex, you can read Atlas Can’s complete breakdown here.

Tip 5: Einstein for Flow

You may have a series of requirements from your business but may not know the best way to kick off the new Flow. Although it’s always best practice to design before you build, there are times when it may be better to be inspired visually before you start your proper design and documentation step.

Einstein for Flow does exactly this. Given a set of instructions, it will craft the skeleton of a new Flow for you so you can visualize and continue building. This is just one of many new features that generative AI brings to Salesforce!

To get to know Einstein for Flow in a few minutes, check out the video below.

Summary

I love Flow, and it never hurts to learn a trick or two to make others’ experiences better! Seeing how others use Flow to make their business users’ lives easier inspires me to discover and share as much as I can. 

I hope you’ve learned a thing or two that you can take with you along your Flow journey. I’d love to hear any other tips you’ve learned that have helped you as well. Please share them with me by commenting below.