Say you're adding a group of people to your membership workflow, but several of them already filled out the appropriate form. Step one is "Send a next steps email with form" — but for those people, that email would be redundant at best, awkward at worst. Without anything in place, someone on your team would have to remember who needs to be manually moved past it.
Rather than making someone on your team responsible for knowing which steps apply to which people, you can now configure the step itself to know. Set it up once, and from then on — whether a staff member adds someone manually or a form submission kicks off the workflow — the right people move through automatically.
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When editing a step, check "Skip this step in some conditions" and define your conditions using the same logic available in People Lists. When a card arrives at that step, conditions are evaluated first — if the person matches, the card moves on immediately without triggering any snooze or actions. No card sits waiting for a manual review it doesn't need, so people arrive at the step that actually matters for them faster.
Someone who already registered for VBS bypasses the "Email registration details" step automatically
Anyone who's already been baptized skips the baptism class invitation step
A person who submitted a form expressing clear interest skips the "Are you interested in learning more?" step
When a card arrives in a skippable step, it will briefly appear with an "Evaluating skip conditions" label. After a few seconds, the evaluation is complete and the person either remains in the current step, or skips to the next step, where new skip conditions might be evaluated. If your first 3 steps all have skip conditions, it's possible to have a card enter the workflow but "land" in step 4, with all of the skipping logged in the Card History so you never have to wonder how it happened.
While we were adding things to the Edit step modal, we refined the rest of its design, not only to make this feature fit in, but to prepare for some future enhancements we have in store. Settings are now presented in the order they are triggered. First skip conditions are evaluated. If the card is not skipped, auto-snoozing could put it on hold for a while. And finally, after any snoozes are done, the card is ready for action and a person is notified.
A cleaner workflow view
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The step header and individual cards have both been tidied up to make your workflow easier to scan at a glance. In the step header, default settings that used to appear as full lines of text are now condensed into small icons in the top-right corner, next to the "Edit step" button — a clock for "Mark overdue after," a zz for auto-snooze, >> if skip conditions are active, and the default assignee's avatar if one is set. On each card, status pills now show abbreviated information ("+ 2d ago" instead of "added 2 days ago"). Hover over any icon or pill to see the full description, or open the card to see everything at once.
Expected response time → Mark overdue after
"Expected response time" has also been renamed to "Mark overdue after..." — the name now matches what it does. Cards that exceed the time you set receive an Overdue badge, and you can filter your step view to show only overdue cards.
The power of workflows
Workflows might be the most broadly useful tool in Planning Center People — not just for your admin team, but for almost anyone on staff who follows up with people. That's why we made the Workflow-only permission and these other recent improvements like the assignees tab, the ability to show all assignees on a step, and bulk editing. And we're not done yet — expect to see more workflow improvements in the coming months!