How to send automatic emails from Autotask Tasks

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 Tasks.

Email Customer when Autotask Task 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 Task Closed
3. Events
   1. Entity: Task
   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
   2. Send Email From: Support Email Address
3. Notification
   1. Notification Template: Task – Created or Edited
4. Create Note from Notification Template: Enabled
5. Click Save & Close

Unlike with tickets, there is not a “Primary Contact” on a project, and the Autotask WFR doesn’t currently support the use of Task Primary Contacts, so instead we’ll select the Contract Notification 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 Task. If you have your support email setup to update both tickets and tasks, this should work fine.

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