How does Workflow Field Update work in Salesforce?
Workflow Field Updates are one of the immediate or time-dependent actions that fire when a Workflow Rule evaluates to true. They can update any field on the triggering record or a field on the parent record in a master-detail relationship. Supported update types include setting a literal value, clearing the field, using a formula to calculate the new value, or assigning the record to a specific user (for Owner fields). Field updates can trigger cross-object workflow and re-evaluation of workflow rules when they change fields that other rules monitor.
Although Workflow Rules have been superseded by Flow for new automation, field updates remain active in thousands of production orgs. Understanding their order of execution is important: field updates fire after before triggers, before after triggers, and before criteria-based sharing recalculation. When a field update causes a workflow rule re-evaluation, it can create indirect recursion. Salesforce recommends migrating workflow field updates to record-triggered flows with before-save updates, which execute more efficiently and consolidate all automation in one framework. Clientell AI can inventory your org's workflow field updates and migrate them to optimized Flow equivalents.