The events and schedules that can start a flow, and how to choose between them.
Every flow starts with one trigger. The trigger decides when the flow runs, how often it runs, and what the flow already knows when it starts. Choosing it is the first decision in the flow builder, and it is the one you cannot change later without rebuilding the flow.There are two kinds:
Event triggers react to something that happened. A meeting finished processing, a deal moved stage, a commitment went overdue.
Schedule triggers run on a cadence you set. Once a day, or once a week on chosen days.
Use an event trigger when the flow should respond to a specific change. It runs once per change, close to when the change happened.
Every day or week
Use a schedule trigger when the flow should sweep a set of records on a cadence, like a digest or a hygiene check.
If you are not sure, type what you want in the composer and leave the trigger set to Let Doris choose. Doris reads your description and picks the closest match.
When a trigger fires, it hands the flow a small set of facts about what happened. The first steps in your flow use those facts to look up the full record. A deal trigger carries the deal, so a Find record step can load that deal with its stakeholders, commitments, and meetings attached.Each trigger page lists what it carries.
A trigger fires on every matching change. To run only on some of them, add a Continue if step near the top of your flow and test a value the trigger carried. A deal stage flow that should only fire on one stage checks the new stage name and stops otherwise.Doris adds these for you when your description implies one. “When a deal over 50k moves to negotiation” becomes a stage trigger with a Continue if on both the stage and the amount.
Flows carry a cooldown. If the same record triggers the same flow twice inside the cooldown window, the second run is skipped. This stops a chatty CRM webhook from producing a burst of near-identical notifications for one deal.
Trigger choice is what makes a flow feel timely or noisy. Prefer the most specific trigger that covers your case: After a deal meeting over After a meeting when the flow is about a deal, and Deal closed over Deal stage changed when you only care about the outcome.
