One question I’ve been asked time after time is why someone should learn Salesforce Flow. It is my strong belief that EVERYONE should understand at least the basics of Salesforce Flow, particularly after the announcement that Salesforce will be sunsetting Workflow Rules and Process Builder shortly in favor of Salesforce Flow.
It doesn’t matter who you are – Administrator, Developer, or an elevated Business User – it’s important that you’re aware of what Salesforce Flow is and how to create some basic Flows.
Who Should Learn Salesforce Flow?
Salesforce Flow is here to stay, and will be used by programmatic and functional Developers, as well as Administrators and elevated business users. Everyone can benefit from this tool, and understanding the best ways to work with it will make it easier for the entire team.
For this reason, I stand by the opinion that EVERYONE should at least be aware of the power of Salesforce Flows. Anyone who will be working within the Setup menu should be able to create, read, and edit a Flow (following best practices). Anyone who would normally be creating automations or user interface enhancements within Salesforce should also be able to created, read, and edit a Flow as well.
The Skills You Will Gain From Learning Flow
As you may have noticed by now, Salesforce Flow is a bit more complicated than Workflow Rules or Process Builder. Beyond just being a single ‘if this then that’ tool, you can create Flows that require a User to provide input (ie. Screen Flows). You can also iterate through a collection of records one by one, and perform complex logic to each one individually.
It may not be something you’ve even considered up until now on your Salesforce journey, but learning Flow will grant you a solid foundation if and when you decide to start learning Apex (and for those who already know Apex and have decided to learn Flow will already have a head start!).
Both Flow and Apex support the ability to have a set of automations triggered by a Create, Update, or Delete event. Both allow for the automation to fire either before or after the commit to the Salesforce database. Apex can trigger an Autolaunched Flow to run, and a Flow can call an Invocable Apex Method.
As you can see, there are a LOT of similarities between the two tools. Learning Flow will get you thinking and building like a programmatic Developer.
The other thing to consider is the fact that Salesforce are moving to a single declarative automation tool over the course of the next few major updates. Salesforce Flow will replace Workflow Rules and Process Builder entirely. If you’re only confident building automation using these legacy tools, you’re not going to have the best time when they’re gone. Flow is here to stay, so it’s in your best interest to master it.
Summary
As you know, Salesforce wants everyone to learn Salesforce (which is why things like Developer Orgs and Trailhead exist). In this lesson, you discovered why you MUST learn Salesforce Flow. You learnt that Apex and Flow are very similar in a lot of ways, so Flow isn’t something restricted to only Administrators or functional Developers, it’s something that programmatic Developers and elevated business users should also be familiar with so that everyone involved in the enhancement of the business’s Salesforce org is aware.