SuiteCRM Workflows are powerful, but some of the available options can be confusing for new users. I’ll try and breakdown some of the elements that determine when and how a workflow runs.

This is written as more advanced tutorial, so it assumes you already had a look at the existing documentation.

When does it run?

Requirements for each kind of Workflow to be triggered

To clarify and facilitate troubleshooting, I’ve laid out every possible combination of the option that affect when Workflows are triggered. Then I can explain each one.

Settings	Cron	Bean Action	First Run
		New	✅
		New
		Edit	✅
		Edit
		Edit+New	✅
		Edit+New
	✅	New	✅
	✅	New
	✅	Edit	✅
	✅	Edit
	✅	Edit+New	✅
	✅	Edit+New
	(✅)	New	✅
	(✅)	New
	(✅)	Edit	✅
	(✅)	Edit
	(✅)	Edit+New	✅
	(✅)	Edit+New

All of the mentioned conditions must be met in order for the Workflow to be successfully triggered.

An additional condition that applies to all Workflows is that they only run if their Status is set to Active.

Cron Requirement

For this requirement, your Scheduler jobs must be getting executed, after a successful configuration. You can check they are running in Admin / Schedulers / Process Workflow Tasks. Go into that job and have a look at the Last ran successfully field. Has it run recently? Is that time in the correct timezone?

If you need to troubleshoot this, have a look at this article I wrote: Scheduler Jobs in SuiteCRM in Linux - the Definitive Guide

• ✅ means that a cron job needs to run for the specified Workflow to be triggered.

• (✅) means that a cron job needs to run for the specified Workflow to be triggered, but the Workflow might also be triggered in a different way, through a bean action.

Bean Action Requirement

Some user takes an action inside a record of the Workflow’s defined module.

• New means this action is creating a new record.

• Edit means this action is editing an existing record, either through an edit view or an inline edit.

• Edit+New means this action is any of the two explained above.

• Indirect actions: sometimes these changes are not directly done by a user, or not directly in that module. It’s common for records to be changed as side effects of other things going on in the CRM. Some of these other actions that change a record “under the hood” will also trigger the Workflow. This depends on whether the developer of that feature included a workflow check with his action; normally it will, since the changes are done through the Bean object, which takes care of this.

First Run Requirement

The specified Workflow will only run if this is the first time it is being triggered for the same record. So the Workflow can be triggered many times, but only if applied to different records.

The history of each Workflow and execution for specific records is saved in the aow_processed table.

More and Better Ways to Trigger SuiteCRM Workflows

Workflows would be so much more powerful if you could set them up as tasks to be invoked fron anywhere in SuiteCRM. That’s exactly what my PowerWorkflows add-on does.

The main criteria that this adds is user discretion. A human being deciding that the Workflow should run now, for this record.