Copy a Notification as an sheet attachment for a specific row

Christos

I am using SmartSheet for various Change Managment approvals, notifications tracking, and auditing automations.

Is there a feature or way that when an Approve / Decline automation is triggered, the notification and response tied to the row where the trigger originated from can be saved as an attachment?

We would use these saved notifications in case of an audit to prove receipt. Currently, I have a column that records the Change disposition, e.g.: Approved, Declined; and also inserts a date when the approval or decline occurred.

A related question for the same purpose is; can notifications be exported in any format or save somewhere long-term?

Courtney S.

Yes, when it generates the document it puts the PDF on the row as a row attachment!

Gia Thinh

Hello @Christos,

You may want to use Smartsheet for Outlook add-in or Smartsheet for Gmail add-on to copy what’s in your email message and add that information to rows in your sheets without leaving Outlook/Gmail

You can also save your email as a msg file or a pdf file in your local storage

Hope it works for you.

Christos

Hi Gia,

Thank you for your response. I already copy the Outlook message notifications to the applicable row as an attachment by dragging and dropping, but I am trying to get away from doing that manual process.

I reviewed the Outlook plugin, but I can't see that it provides any additional useful functionality above what I can already do without it.

Courtney S.

I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but my org uses the 'Generate document' automation action to make a PDF once a form submission/row has gone through all the approvals/verifications it needs. I just chained together a bunch of individual short workflows to make the whole process easy to troubleshoot/change. Eg:
- Workflow 1: Assign people (assign a Contact to be the approver in an approval request, assign a Contact to be the verifier in an Update Request)

- Workflow 2: "Request an approval" to assigned contact

- Workflow 3: "Record a date" in Approved Date column as soon as the approval column changes to Approved

- Workflow 4: "Request an update" to assigned contact (they get a "Verification" column to edit)

- Workflow 5: "Record a date" in Verification Date column as soon as the verification column changes to Verified

- Workflow 6: Generate Document as soon as the Verification Date column changes.

If you haven't used the "Generate document" action before, you'll need to start with a PDF with fillable fields that you then upload into Smartsheet.

Automatically generate documents with workflows | Smartsheet Learning Center

We use various fields in the row to fill in fields in a PDF that gets attached to the row. To make the approver/verifier Contacts display in the PDF as names instead of emails, we do have to use text/number columns that are literally just "=[Relevant contact column name]@row" and map those to the PDF.

Courtney S.

In terms of having a record/report of all notifications sent, I don't think that's a feature that Smartsheet really has built in right now. Here's a related new product idea that you may like to upvote: https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/128675/communication-log

Christos

I have heard of the "Generate document" action but didn't think to use it like that. Thanks for the tip. I'll test it out and let you know.
After generating the document, can it be saved automatically to attachments?

Courtney S.

Yes, when it generates the document it puts the PDF on the row as a row attachment!