Let your clients trigger monday.com automations from your client portal

Want to let your clients trigger predefined monday.com automations on board items in your client portal? This guide covers everything you need to know about managing action buttons.

Use the navigation below to quickly jump to your desired section and learn more about each topic.

Introduction

Use action buttons for status updates or any predefined monday.com automations in your client portal

One easy way to let your clients interact with monday.com board items in a client portal made with Client Portal Builder are action buttons. These action buttons can be referenced to monday.com automations, that trigger status updates or any kind of automations you predefined in your automation center. Watch the video below to get a quick overview.

Option A: Status Update

Use the provided monday.com automation recipe to let your clients update an item status

Before we can create and connect our action buttons to the automation, we first have to prepare our target board. In this example we want our clients to either accept or reject different proposals represented by board items. The column structure is quite simple. We add a status column with customized values such as Accepted, Rejected and "Empty". Further we add a file column with proposal PDF files.

Now we can open the Client Portal Builder for monday.com app and set up our board source and section. To keep things super simple for this example, we choose the Shared Board type as board source. This also works with Single Client Boards and Shared Client Boards, which are likely more actual use cases. Learn more about how and when to use the different board sources and board sections here.

Once you have configured the basics, you can add two action buttons to the board section. Choose the button type Primary or Secondary for each, label the buttons with Approve and Reject, and assign a unique ID approve and reject as shown in the screenshot below.

To display the action buttons conditionally, we need to add a new condition to each button. Click the conditions button to the very left and add the condition to each button as shown in the screenshot below. The condition basically defines to only show the buttons in the client portal, when the status is not Accepted or Rejected. Save your conditions.

Now head over to your Proposals Board and open the automation center. Go to the Templates tab at the very top, and click Integrations button at the bottom left. Then search for Client Portal Builder and choose the app. Now click on the ready-made recipe to use the Template.

The first automation references our Accept action button. Fill out the Action ID with the value accept, choose the Status column, and its value Accepted. Repeat this step for the second automation that references our Reject action button.

Your automation center on monday.com should look like the following afterwards.

If everything is configured successfuly, your board section in the client portal should look like the following. Status updates triggerd through action buttons are reflected in the portal and on the associated monday.com board. The action button conditions ensure that the action buttons are only displayed when no status is set on the board item.

Option B: Custom automations

Use and create fully customized monday.com automations triggered by action buttons

For this, everything from the above applies to this variant. Beside the fact we are not using the ready-made recipe template to update a status, but we are creating a fully customized monday.com automation.

After opening the automation center on the target board, we simply click the Add automation button directly in the top left. Now we click the trigger When this happens, and choose the Client Portal Builder Button Click option. Then choose and set the unique target Action ID value we defined in the Client Portal Builder board section. After that we can chain any automations provided by monday.com or other third party apps. In this case we first notify Markus about the approved proposal, and then move the item to the Approved group.