Using Calendars in business rules while building an app can help auto-calculate dates based on specific conditions, ensuring those dates fall on working days according to the calendar specifications. Let's explore a use case to understand this concept better:
Use case: In an organization, sales representatives follow a four-step process to sign a customer:
- Kick-off call (Day 1)
- Follow-up call (within 5 days after Kick-off call)
- Product Demo Call (within 2 days after Follow-up call)
- Deal Closure Call (within 5 days after Demo call)
Sales representatives are required to maintain call recordings and track follow-up call dates after completing a Kick-off call with a customer. To simplify this process, they need to submit all the details about the Kick-off call through an app. In this app, when they enter the date of the Kick-off call, the app should automatically calculate and populate dates for all the other follow-up calls based on predefined conditions for each step in the sales process. This automation would help streamline the follow-up process and ensure timely communication with customers.
Now, let us create an app to implement this use case.
App Creation
1. Form Elements: Create a form with customer details (Name & Phone number) and four date fields (Kick-off call, Follow-up call, Demo call, Deal Closure call).
2. Workflow: Configure the workflow to manage the app's processes.
3. Business Rules: In order to accomplish our goal of auto-populating the dates while ignoring the holidays, we must use calendars.
- Use calendars to calculate dates based on the specified conditions.
- Add rules for each step to populate dates for the follow-up calls automatically.
Recall the steps and conditions followed by sales representatives, based on which you can define conditions for the dates.
Refer to the video below to understand how to use calendars while configuring the business rules.
- To automatically populate the Product Demo Call date field, configure the business rule as follows.
- To automatically populate the Deal Closure Call date field, configure the business rule as follows.
- Once all the business rules have been configured, publish the application.
- Next, open the newly created app in Add Record mode to verify if the dates are automatically calculated (excluding holidays) in the other date fields when a date is provided in the Kick off call date field.
- The dates will be automatically generated based on the defined rules and calendar, as demonstrated below.