Some processes are very linear and will always take the same path.
Most processes however have multiple paths and branches that they can take. In those cases, conditional logic can be used to only show specific steps if they apply in that particular property's case. (Note that while the Growth plan gives access to stage change steps, only the Operations plan has access to conditional logic).
Now you can use conditional logic to also build automatic stage changes into the process as well! Here's a couple examples:
Lease Renewals:
The process needs to move from the "Upcoming" stage to "Owner Non-Renewal", because this owner doesn't want to renew with this tenant. So we choose "Owner's Renewal Choice: Not Renewing" when prompted.
There is then a step in the process that is conditional on the "Owner's Renewal Choice" being selected as "Not Renewing". It is set to move the process to the "Owner Non-Renewal Stage" and is set to do that automatically, immediately after the step before it is marked as complete.
If the owner is planning to renew however, we would skip this step and move on in the Upcoming stage until we hit a similar question/stage change step after asking the tenant if they plan to renew.
Application Screening:
In this stage, we have multiple automatic stage changes, all dependent on custom fields that are filled out in the process:
Setting it Up in Your Process
Note that you can have multiple stage changes in the workflow and that they can be anywhere in the workflow: drag and drop them just like other step types.
They can be conditional or not, and be set to happen automatically or be manual tasks that ask you to change the stage manually.
Select the stage you want the process moved to here:
Then set the step to happen automatically:
And finally, set the conditional logic here:
Actioning Manual Stage-Change Tasks
To action a stage-change step (if it is manual), click the green arrow button on the righthand side of the task:
Additional Notes
Note that an auto stage-change step will be downgraded to a manual task if there are still uncompleted tasks in the process that are connected to the current stage the process is in.
This is because changing the stage would remove those tasks before they are completed, which could cause important tasks to be inadvertently skipped.
There are two ways to avoid this downgrading:
Make sure that the step before the auto stage-change is a wait step, so that task has to be completed before the stage change step is triggered. However, this does not necessarily mean that there will be no uncompleted tasks on the process and the stage-change task may still be downgraded to a manual task.
The second option is to make any previous non-wait steps in the process required. Use the asterisk icon on those steps to make them stick to the process regardless of whether it moves out of the stage that original generated them.