For Admins and Team Owners. Building and editing recipes is only available to these roles.
1. Find the Workflows area
Go to Settings → Workflows.
This opens Workflow Recipes, a list of every recipe in your account. From here you can open an existing recipe to edit it, or create a new one.
2. Create a recipe and name it
Use the + in the top corner to create a new recipe, then give it a name.
The name is what people see when they start a workflow, so make it clear and specific. Name it for the outcome rather than the mechanism — Document Approval, not Two-step task chain. Each recipe name must be unique within your account.
3. Visibility and the Hidden list
Every new recipe starts hidden. Hidden recipes sit in the Hidden section at the bottom of the list, marked Not available to choose when starting a new workflow. People can't start a workflow from a hidden recipe, which gives you space to build and test it before anyone uses it.
When the recipe is ready, turn on the Visibility toggle to release it. From that point it appears in the list people choose from when starting a workflow.
Important — Editing any step puts the recipe back into a hidden state until you review it and turn Visibility back on. This is deliberate: it stops half-finished changes reaching the people who run your workflows. Expect to switch Visibility back on after each round of edits.
4. Configure the first task step
Each step in a recipe is a standard Wórkiro task. The first task has been added for you, open it to configure in the Task editor.
A task step has the following parts:
- Title — write it as an action and a goal, for example Collate documents. This is what the participant sees as their task.
- Participants — who carries out the task. Use the + to assign a specific person, or a Role when the right person isn't known until the workflow is running. (See "Roles" below.). Important: If there are external participants, always remember to include a member of your team directly, or a role to be filled internally, so someone can answer questions and monitor the task.
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Guidance — optional instructions that help the participant complete the task. This text travels with the task.
- Outcomes and Next Steps — the choices the participant picks from when they finish, and where each choice sends the workflow next. (Covered in detail in section 5.)
- Comment — an optional first comment included in the task.
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Relates To — optionally tag the task, or relate it to a project, or connection so it's classified and listed correctly.
At the bottom, Team Access controls who can access the task. Participants can always access the task, but depending on access controls and related connections not everyone on the team will have access. Learn more about access.
When the step is set up, choose Save.
Note — The Task Step editor is a focused version of the normal Workiro task editor. Outcomes are required here (in a normal task they're optional), and a step can have up to 5 outcomes.
5. Outcomes and next steps
This is the heart of a recipe. Every step needs at least one outcome, up to a maximum of five. An outcome is a decision the participant makes when they mark the task complete, and each outcome decides where the workflow goes next.
In your first task, an Untitled outcome has been added as an example. You can then choose Add Outcome to create one.
On any outcome, open the ... menu to set what it does:
- Rename — change the outcome's label (the words the participant will see, such as Ready for review or Abandon draft). Outcome names must be unique within the step.
- Remove — delete the outcome.
- New Task — create the next step and route this outcome to it. Name the new step as you go.
- Existing Step — route this outcome to a step that already exists. This is how you build loops, such as sending a rejected item back for another attempt.
- End Workflow — finish the workflow along this path.
Drag the handle on an outcome row to reorder the outcomes.
NOTE: Outcomes are only visible to your team, external participants will have the option to 'Suggest Complete'.
Tip - Documents attached to a task while the workflow runs are carried forward automatically to the next step, so you don't need a separate step just to pass files along. See Starting and tracking a workflow for how this works during a run.
Worked example: Document Approval
This recipe shows a very simple branch and a loop working together:
Collate documents (start) has two outcomes:
- Ready for review routes to the next step, Review document draft.
- Abandon draft ends the workflow.
Review document draft has two outcomes:
- Document approved routes to the next step, Finalise and send to client.
- Changes requested routes back to Collate documents using Existing Step, creating the loop.
Finalise and send to client has one outcome:
- Documents finalised ends the workflow.
Tip — There's no separate "loop" control. You build a loop by pointing an outcome at an existing step, as Resubmit does here.
6. Roles
Sometimes you know what part a person plays in a process but not who they'll be until the workflow is running. A Role is a named placeholder for that person, for example Client Contact, Approving Partner or Reviewing Manager. You assign the role to a step now, and the actual person is chosen later, while the workflow runs.
To create a role, open a step, go to Participants, choose +, then ... → New Role.
Give the role a name and choose Save.
The role is now available to assign as a participant on any step...
...and it appears in a Roles section on the recipe.
A person is elected to a role when a workflow runs, not whilst you build the recipe. Roles may need to be filled when the workflow is started, and others the first time a step needs them. For instance, an Approving Partner on a late review step only needs to be filled once the workflow reaches that point. At that point the correct partner is already known.
Tip: Use a role for any participant who changes from one run to the next, such as the client or the assigned partner. Assign a specific person directly only when it's genuinely always the same individual.
7. Validate and release
A recipe can only be released once it's complete. A step stays invalid until it has everything it needs, including at least one outcome, and a single invalid step holds back the whole recipe. While a recipe is invalid you can't make it visible, and no one can start it.
Work through the steps until none are flagged as invalid, then turn on the Visibility toggle to release the recipe. (See section 3.)
8. Editing a recipe that's already running
A released recipe may have live workflows running against it. Two things on the recipe help you manage this:
- Active Instances shows how many live runs currently exist for the recipe. Individual steps also show a count, such as 1 Active, so you can see where live work is sitting.
- Update All pushes your latest changes out to those in-progress runs, so they pick up the new version rather than continuing on the one they started with.
Important: Steps can't be deleted from active recipes. If a previously active task is no longer reachable due to recipe changes, it stays in the recipe as 'Orphaned' rather than being removed.
What's next
Your recipe is built and released. Now see how it runs:
Starting and tracking a workflow covers starting a workflow from your recipe, completing the tasks it creates, and following its progress.