Require Child Records

To kind of piggy back on Mark's idea, I have a parent record that before it can move to the next "status" (level, area, what have you), certain fields have to be filled in. Some of them are child records ... or more specifically fields within child records.

I built a bunch of summary fields, one for each field that needed to be filled in, to indicate if that field has data or not. I also created summary fields to indicate how many children records a parent record had.

I then took all those summary fields and pushed them up to the top of the pecking order, and built a text formula field to list which fields, or required items, are not completed, based off of those summary fields. The results are big and red (hence the piggy back off of mark's comment ... plus he helped steer me in the right direction.)

Also, if that summary field has any items listed, essentially if it is not blank, then the parent record cannot move through the automation to the next stage.

I have a report built for each rep indicating which parent records fall into the "missing items" group, list which items are missing, and then they can manage their own records. Management can also have access to that report, and a whole bunch of stuff can be done with it.

You can still do notifications and subscriptions to capture those stragglers that hand out there, but for the most part, this has worked well for us! Hopefully it does the same for you.

The one downside I currently am facing is that I may have multiple children records to a single parent record, and although my setup indicates which field is missing the required info, it doesn't indicate which child record for that parent record is the culprit. I am working on that one still, so hopefully I find a solution soon.

Good luck!

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Andrew Fry
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