How to send automatic emails from Autotask Projects

As with helpdesk tickets, you’ll find that you need to send automated emails to customers when you work on projects and project tasks in Autotask. And, again as with tickets, this is done using the Autotask Workflow Rule (WFR) engine. We include a YouTube video if you prefer that format.

Let’s setup a scenario to demonstrate this: You want to send a notification when either an individual Project Task or an entire Project is closed.

To do this, we need to setup two WFR rules:

• Email Customer when Project Closed
• Email Customer when Project Task Closed

In this article, we’ll focus on automated emails when closing Projects.

Email Customer when Autotask Project Closed

Let’s create a new WFR via Admin->Workflow Rules

In the WFR screen, click on the Projects tab

1. Click New
2. General
   1. Workflow Rule Name: Email Customer when Autotask Project Closed
3. Events
   1. Entity: Project
   2. Created/Edited: Edited
4. Conditions
   1. Status CHANGED TO Complete

Now that you’ve setup the trigger for the WFR, let’s setup the notification.

1. Click on the Notification tab
2. Recipients
   1. Select Contract Notification Contact, Primary Account Contact
   2. Send Email From: Support Email Address
3. Notification
   1. Notification Template: Project – Completed
4. Create Note from Notification Template: Enabled
5. Click Save & Close

Unlike with tickets & tasks, there is not a “Primary Contact” on a project, so instead we’ll select the Contract Notification Contact and the Primary Account Contact for this example.

For Send Email From, you can either have it come from your Support Email Address or the person that updated the Project. The problem with using the Support Email Address is that a reply will go into a new ticket, not the existing project. There are ways around this by using the Notification Template settings (e.g., by specifying no-reply@yourcompany.tld in the Template from setting) if you prefer that.

I’m a big fan that all automated notifications should directly log what they send, which is why we enabled the Create Note feature.