Calculated / virtual entities

Ideas & Features
1

We use Fibery as a nonprofit fundraising CRM: there are a bunch of domain-specific entities (people, orgs, grant applications, donations etc.) and Tasks associated with them.

Currently Tasks have to be created manually. However, depending on an entity’s state, sometimes, there must always be a task. For example:

  • If a donation is in “pledged” state, there must always be a task to collect it. Once it changes to a “paid” state, there must be a task to thank the donor. After that, there must be no task.
  • If a prospect is in “finding introduction” state, there must always be a task to find a warm intro to them.
  • Etc.

I could see this being structured as having a prospect’s or a donation’s “Tasks” be a calculated field that is recalculated upon changes to some of its fields. This is not impossible (for an engineer) to do via scripting automations, but I imagine there could be big possibilities if we had this as a first-class feature, allowing formulas to return entities or lists of entities, including new entities.

2

This should be fairly easy to achieve using automations without needing any scripting.
No need for coding :blush:

3

From a data architecture standpoint this is not how you’d want to use a task database or calculations..
What happens to a task when the state changes and you have already completed it?

A task is an entity, a donation is an entity. A formula that links the two but only when the state matches would leave a lot of completed tasks orphaned without a pledge when the state changes.

That said, what I think you mean is that you want tasks created and linked to a donation when the state changes. That’s the solution Chris mentioned above where you can use an automation to create a linked task when the status changes.