Perform Automation Actions Against Fields not on Layout

Who would benefit?

All Users, but especially administrators.

What impact would it make?

It would allow administrators to perform automations against records without the associated field ever being visible on the record.

Reports also already support looking at all fields by record type, so potentially, these

How should it work?

Allow all fields for the record type to be accessible via automations at the trigger, condition and action levels. Currently, when designing automations within a workspace template - you can see the fields, however whether or not you can perform actions against them depends on whether or not the associated field is on the layout for that workspace.

The goal of this change would to be able to allow a record to contain data (and fill that data via automations) while the field is not associated on the corresponding layout for that record.

There are a ton of possible use cases for automations, such as flagging a record for admin review, setting logical checks in the background when certain conditions are met to then trigger other automations, setting date fields to automatically review records X number of days after a record is created or reaches a certain status. It could also be used for data retention options, such as automatically deleting a record after 5 years of inactivity, etc.

These are all examples where you may need a field to hold data to trigger an automation and that you might add data to via another automation but you may not necessarily want end users to see the fields on the record as they may cause unneeded clutter.

I may be mistaken as it has been a while since I have performed an import, but I believe the only way to populate fields on a record that are not part of that record's layout is by performing a CSV import today - so it is theoretically possible but just needs to be opened so that there are other means of filling that data.

Currently - if an automation is programmed to add data to a field that is not on the associated layout for the current record the automation is running against - it simply skips that step and provides no audit log of it doing so.