Your Salesforce Automations Have an Expiration Date: What RIAs Need to Know Now

Picture this: It's January 2026. That's just 8 weeks from now. A high net worth client calls about a missing quarterly report. You check Salesforce and discover your automated report generation stopped working. The compliance team notices that new account alerts aren't firing. Your ops manager can't figure out why client onboarding tasks aren't being assigned automatically anymore.

This isn't a distant threat. With less than two months until Salesforce's retirement of Process Builder and Workflow Rules, this could be your reality in just weeks.

The Clock Is Ticking

Here's what you need to know right now: Salesforce is ending support for Workflow Rules and Process Builder on December 31, 2025. After this date, these automation tools won't receive any bug fixes, security updates, or customer support. While they might continue limping along for a while, any issues that arise will be your problem to solve, with zero help from Salesforce.

If you've been keeping up with Salesforce changes, you've likely already started using Flow for new automations since Workflow Rules and Process Builders can no longer be created. That's actually good news. Every Flow you've built over the past year or two has been practice for this migration. If you haven't touched Flow yet, now's the time to start getting comfortable with it, because it's not just the future of Salesforce automation, it's the present.

Why Your RIA Firm Should Care

Let's translate this from Salesforce speak into RIA reality. Process Builder and Workflow Rules likely power many of your firm's critical operations:

Client Service Automations

• Automated welcome emails for new clients
• Birthday and anniversary reminders
• Quarterly review scheduling
• Performance report distribution

Compliance and Operations

• Document expiration alerts
• Compliance review triggers
• Risk tolerance update reminders
• Account restriction notifications

Team Coordination

• Task assignments for account transfers
• New account setup workflows
• Client issue escalation paths
• Team member notification chains

Revenue Operations

• Fee calculation triggers
• Billing alert systems
• AUM threshold notifications
• Commission calculations

If any of these sound familiar, you have work to do before December 31, 2025.

Making the Best of a Bad Situation

Let's be honest: with 8 weeks left, this isn't the strategic modernization opportunity you wanted. It's crisis management. But even in crisis mode, you can make smart decisions.

The Silver Lining While you're doing emergency triage, you'll:

• Finally document what all these automations actually do
• Identify which processes are truly critical vs. nice-to-have
• Discover redundant or obsolete workflows you can simply retire
• Build Flow skills your team will need going forward

At Future State Consultants, we've helped many RIAs through this exact crisis, and every single one discovered automations they didn't even remember creating. The forced review, while stressful, always reveals opportunities to simplify.

The Harsh Reality You won't have time to:

• Optimize and consolidate properly
• Build elegant solutions
• Train thoroughly
• Test every edge case

And that's okay. Survival first, optimization later. Make a list of everything you wish you could improve, and tackle it in Q1 2026 when you're not racing against a deadline.

Your Emergency Action Plan

With less than 60 days until the deadline, you need to move fast but smart. Here's your compressed timeline:

Week 1-2: Rapid Discovery (Start TODAY)

Immediate Inventory

1. Export all Workflow Rules and Process Builders NOW
2. Flag anything that touches compliance, client communications, or money
3. Identify your top 10 most critical automations
4. Check for any managed package dependencies

Quick Triage Sort everything into three buckets:

• Red: Must migrate (firm breaks without these)
• Yellow: Should migrate (significant pain if broken)
• Green: Nice to have (can live without temporarily)

Week 3-4: Strategic Decisions

The 80/20 Approach You don't have time for perfection. Focus on the 20% of automations that deliver 80% of the value.

Make Hard Choices

• Migrate critical processes only
• Plan to rebuild non-critical items in Q1 2026
• Use out-of-the-box features where possible
• Consider temporary manual workarounds for complex processes

Get Help NOW If you haven't already:

• Contact your Salesforce partner today
• Get emergency consulting quotes (reach out to Future State)
• Rally internal resources
• Clear other projects from the calendar

Week 5-6: Rapid Migration

Use Every Tool Available

• Salesforce's Migrate to Flow tool for simple conversions
• Manual rebuilds only for complex critical processes
• Document minimum viable requirements
• Skip nice-to-have enhancements for now

Parallel Processing

• Admin team migrates simple workflows
• Consultant handles complex processes
• Business team documents current processes
• Everyone tests continuously

Week 7: Testing Blitz

Focus Testing on Critical Paths

• Client onboarding flow
• Compliance notifications
• Billing and fee calculations
• Any automation touching client money or regulatory requirements

Acceptable Risks

• Some edge cases might not be covered
• Enhancement requests go to 2026 backlog
• Non-critical reports might need manual runs temporarily

Week 8: Final Push

December Scramble

• Final testing of critical processes
• Quick team training on must-know changes
• Backup plans for anything not migrated
• Document what's migrated vs. what's not

Red Flags That Need Immediate Attention

With only 8 weeks left, you need to identify showstoppers NOW. If you have any of these, they need to be your top priority:

Complex Criteria

• Workflow Rules that reference fields on related objects
• Process Builders with multiple decision branches
• Time-based actions with complicated conditions

High-Volume Processes

• Automations that fire hundreds of times daily
• Bulk update processes
• Integration-triggered workflows

Mission-Critical Operations

• Compliance notifications
• Client communication workflows
• Anything touching money movement

If you have more than 5 items in the above categories, stop everything else and call in professional help today. You don't have time to learn through trial and error.

Tools and Resources (Use What Works, Fast)

Salesforce's Migrate to Flow Tool Your best friend for the next 8 weeks. It's not perfect, but it's fast. Use it for simple automations and move on.

Skip the Training, Focus on Doing

• Forget Trailhead modules for now
• Learn by migrating your actual processes
• Google specific error messages as they come up
• Ask for help in Salesforce communities when stuck

Get Professional Help NOW With 8 weeks left, if you have:

• More than 20 automations to migrate
• Any Process Builders with multiple branches
• Limited Flow experience
• A day job that isn't Salesforce admin

...you NEED outside help. Today. Not next week. Emergency rates are still cheaper than broken operations in January.

The Cost of Waiting

Let's be brutally honest about where we are:

Today (November 3, 2025): 58 days to migrate, test, and deploy. Challenging but possible with focus. Mid-November: 45 days. Every day matters. Premium consulting rates kick in. December 1: 30 days. Full panic mode. Mistakes are almost guaranteed. December 15: 16 days. You're now gambling with your firm's operations. December 29: 2 days. Hope your clients are understanding when things break.

What Success Looks Like (In 8 Weeks)

Let's be realistic. In 8 weeks, success isn't perfection. Success is:

• Critical automations migrated and working
• Compliance-related processes protected
• Client-facing automations functional
• Manual backup plans for anything not migrated
• Team knows what changed and how to handle gaps
• January 1, 2026 arrives without major disruptions

The optimization, enhancement, and cleanup? That's your 2026 project. Right now, success means survival.

Your Next Steps (Do These TODAY)

1. Before lunch: Run that inventory report. You need to know what you're dealing with.
2. This afternoon: Call an emergency meeting with your ops team.
3. Tomorrow: Contact at least three Salesforce consultants for availability (Future State Consultants at future-state.ai has RIA expertise and emergency capacity).
4. This week: Identify and start migrating your top 5 critical automations.
5. By November 15: Have 25% migrated and tested.
6. By December 1: Have 75% migrated, remainder planned.
7. By December 20: Everything critical migrated, team aware of any gaps.

The Bottom Line

We're 8 weeks from a hard deadline. This is no longer about planning; it's about execution. December 31, 2025, doesn't care if you're busy with year-end tasks or holiday schedules.

Here's the reality check: If you haven't started your migration yet, you're already behind. But behind doesn't mean defeated. With focused effort and likely some outside help, you can still protect your critical operations.

The firms that act THIS WEEK will manage this crisis. They'll migrate their essential processes, have contingency plans for the rest, and enter 2026 operational.

The firms that wait even two more weeks? They're rolling the dice with their client service, compliance requirements, and team sanity.

You have 58 days. That's 40 business days accounting for Thanksgiving and the December holidays. Every single day counts.

Stop reading. Start migrating.

Need emergency help with your Salesforce migration? Future State Consultants specializes in rapid Salesforce migrations for RIAs and understands the unique compliance and operational requirements of wealth management firms. With less than 60 days remaining, every hour counts. Visit future-state.ai or reach out immediately for a rapid assessment and migration support. This is not a drill.