Work Items, Automations & Workflows
Leasecake gives you three coordinated tools for tracking tasks and automating action across your lease portfolio. Work Items are structured tasks that move through defined stages with assignees, priorities, and checklists. Automations are trigger-driven rules that run actions automatically when something happens in your portfolio. Workflows are the durable execution engine that powers Automations — each Automation runs as a Workflow under the hood.
The three work together: an Automation can create a Work Item, and a Work Item's approval can gate whether an Automation proceeds.
Work Items
A Work Item is a trackable task tied to a subject in your portfolio — a lease, a location, a deal, or any other record. Every Work Item moves through a pipeline of ordered stages, accumulates a full activity timeline, and carries a complete audit trail of every change made to it.
Pipelines and Stages
Each Work Item belongs to a Work Queue, and each Work Queue is backed by a pipeline of ordered stages. Items advance forward through stages (Advance), step back with a mandatory reason (Revert), or jump past a stage (Skip). The interface only ever targets the adjacent stage — there is no arbitrary jump between non-adjacent stages.
Each stage in a pipeline can carry:
Status and Priority
Every Work Item carries a status and a priority. The list and board sort items by priority first, then due date, then creation date within each group. Status and priority sections use a weighted sort so Urgent always leads Low, and statuses follow the natural lifecycle order — not alphabetical order.
Status | What it means |
|---|---|
Active | The item is open and being worked |
Snoozed | Temporarily deferred — shown with a moon indicator in the list |
Pending Approval | Waiting for one or more approvers before it can proceed |
Completed | All stages finished or the item was resolved as a one-off |
Approvals
A stage can require approval before an item advances. When approval is required, the item enters Pending Approval status and waits. An approval counts only while it is within the policy's validity window and the approver is still an active member of the workspace with the appropriate permission. A one-off Work Item — one with no further stages after approval — is completed automatically when its approval is granted.
Views: List and Board
Work Items are accessible from Work in the navigation. The default view is a grouped list; a Board lens shows the same items arranged by stage as columns. Both views share identical columns, filters, and search — including the Stage SLA badge, status and priority indicators, due date, and assignee. The Board applies the same search and filters as the list, so switching views never changes which items are visible.
The list opens grouped by queue by default. You can regroup by status, priority, assignee, flow, flow step, or source using the grouping controls.
Preset scope filters let you quickly narrow to:
Activity Timeline and Audit Trail
Every mutation to a Work Item — stage transitions, assignments, priority changes, approvals, checklist updates, file attachments, reminders — is recorded as an event in the item's activity timeline. The timeline is a complete, immutable audit trail: you can see exactly what happened, in what order, and who made each change.
Automations
An Automation is a rule that watches for something to happen in your portfolio and then runs one or more actions automatically. Each Automation is built from three parts: a Trigger, optional Conditions, and one or more Actions.
Triggers
A trigger defines what starts the Automation. There are two kinds:
Trigger type | Starts when |
|---|---|
Event | A specific thing happens in your portfolio — a lease is published, a key date passes, a field changes, a Work Item moves to a new stage, and more |
Schedule | A recurring rule (RRULE) comes due — for example, every first of the month, or annually on a specific date |
Event triggers cover the full lifecycle of your portfolio. The event catalog includes lease lifecycle events (commencement, expiration, holdover, amendment), key date categories (option notice windows, renewal deadlines, exit dates), Work Item stage transitions, approval decisions, and more.
Schedule triggers use a recurrence rule and are evaluated every minute. When a scheduled trigger comes due, the Automation runs for every matching subject in your portfolio.
Trigger Timing
Event triggers support a timing setting that controls whether the Automation runs before or after the triggering change is saved.
This distinction is what enables approval workflows: a before trigger holds the originating action until the Work Item it creates is approved.
Conditions
Conditions are optional filters evaluated against the subject at the moment the trigger fires. If the conditions are not met, the Automation does not run for that subject. Conditions let you target an Automation precisely — for example, running only for leases in a specific region, above a certain rent threshold, or assigned to a particular team. Leave conditions empty to run for every matching subject.
Actions
Actions are what the Automation does when its trigger fires and its conditions pass. An Automation can have multiple actions, and they run in the order you define them.
Action | What it does |
|---|---|
Create a Work Item | Opens a new Work Item in a specified queue and pipeline, optionally pre-assigning it and setting its priority and due date |
Send a notification | Delivers a message to one or more members or roles, using token substitution to include details from the triggering subject |
Update a field | Writes a value to a field on the subject, keeping records current without manual intervention |
Advance a Work Item stage | Moves an existing Work Item forward in its pipeline, useful for chaining Automations across a multi-step process |
Token Substitution in Actions
Action text fields — such as notification messages and Work Item titles — support tokens: placeholders that are replaced with real values from the triggering subject when the Automation runs. The token catalog covers fields from the subject itself (lease name, commencement date, expiration date, rent amount, location, and more) as well as context fields from the triggering event. This lets a single Automation template produce specific, meaningful output for every lease it touches.
How Automations and Work Items Work Together
The most powerful use of Automations is connecting them to Work Items to build structured approval and review workflows. The key mechanism is the gated trigger: a before event trigger holds the originating action — such as publishing a lease amendment — until the Automation's Work Item is resolved.
Approval Workflow Example
Here is how a lease amendment approval workflow operates end to end:
Trigger fires
A team member initiates a lease amendment. The Automation's before trigger intercepts the publish action before it is saved.
Work Item created
The Automation's action creates a Work Item in the designated approval queue, pre-populated with details from the amendment using token substitution.
Action is held
The amendment publish is held — it does not complete — while the Work Item is open. The lease shows as Amendment Pending during this time.
Approver reviews
The assigned approver sees the Work Item in their Awaiting My Approval queue. They review the details and approve or reject.
Gate releases or refuses
On approval, the held action is released and the amendment publishes automatically. On rejection, the held action is discarded and the amendment does not proceed.
This pattern works for any action that supports gating — not just lease amendments. Any before trigger can hold its originating action, making it possible to require human review before any significant change takes effect in your portfolio.
Chaining Automations Through Work Item Stages
Automations can also trigger from Work Item events. When a Work Item advances to a new stage, is approved, or is completed, that event can fire its own Automation — which can in turn send notifications, update lease fields, or create follow-up Work Items. This lets you build multi-step operational processes entirely within Leasecake, without external tools.
Building an Automation
Open Automations
Navigate to Automations in the left sidebar.
Create a new Automation
Select New Automation and give it a name that describes what it does.
Choose a trigger
Select Event or Schedule. For an event trigger, pick the event from the catalog and set the timing (before or after). For a schedule trigger, configure the recurrence rule.
Add conditions (optional)
Add one or more conditions to narrow which subjects the Automation runs for. Leave conditions empty to run for every matching subject.
Add actions
Add one or more actions in the order they should run. Configure each action — selecting the target queue, notification recipients, field values, or tokens as appropriate.
Save and activate
Save the Automation. It becomes active immediately and will run the next time its trigger fires.
Managing Work Queues and Pipelines
Work Queues and their pipeline configurations are managed separately from individual Work Items. Queue configuration — stages, SLA rules, checklist templates, and assignee rules — is set up by an administrator and applies to every item that enters that queue. Changes to queue configuration take effect for new items and stage transitions; they do not retroactively alter the recorded history of existing items.
To configure a Work Queue, go to Settings and open the Work Queues section. From there you can: