Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Wolfe, Platform Engineer.

Join us as we chat about how she built a Flow-powered user management system to handle requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even onboarding.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Wolfe.

Streamlining change requests with screen flows

It's a good thing when your organization is growing, right? For Salesforce Admins, however, new hires need new accounts, and that means approvals, permissions, and onboarding. My guest this week, Michelle Wolfe, found herself in exactly this situation. She turned to Flow to build an automated user management system with no code, and she's here to tell us all about it.

Michelle's company was bringing in 80+ people per new hire class, but the account creation request process was a mess. Managers would email a random member of the three-person admin team, and then they would manually create the account. So the first step was to wrangle the business process with a screen flow to get the correct information into Salesforce and create a case.

But Michelle was just getting started. Now that everything was in Salesforce, she knew that she could use Flow to automate the rest of the process.

New account creation with autolaunched flows

Once the new user's information was approved by their manager, Michelle set up an autolaunched flow to spin up the account. This took care of data validation, configuring the correct permissions, and creating a username.

Finally, a second autolaunched flow would close out the case and send two email actions: one to confirm the request, and one to welcome the new user. With help from Flow and Einstein Copilot, Michelle transformed a complicated manual business process into something streamlined, simple, and scalable.

Partner with your training team for a fresh perspective on your org

Michelle credits her success with how closely she works with her training team on enhancements. "Because they interact with new employees, they see things differently than someone who's been here for years and knows how we use our Salesforce," she explains. That fresh perspective helps her identify improvements she might otherwise miss.

Listen to my full conversation with Michelle for more on how she used Flow to automate user management—we really get into the weeds. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Michelle Wolf to talk about what happens when user onboarding stops being a string of emails and becomes a real platform process. So Michelle built a Flow-powered system that handles requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even offboarding, while keeping the admin team in control. We're going to talk about the automation behind it, but also the process decisions that make it accurate, secure, and useful for her business. Now, because when admins design access and onboarding well, they're not just saving time. They're protecting trust and helping people get productive faster. So listen in, subscribe, share this episode with an admin who has one too many user requests sitting in their inbox. I'll tell you who doesn't have too many user in requests sitting in their inbox, and that's Michelle. So let's get Michelle on the podcast. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle Wolf: Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike: I think this is exciting because I can't recall the number of times I've had people on about onboarding users. And I think it's because whatever cool tool we have come out, it's the second thing people do. They're like, "Oh, I could do this, and I need to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z when I onboard people." Because it was like that with Flow. There was stuff with Chatter when that came out, "How do I onboard people and add them to groups?" And Jennifer Lee was at your session at Midwest Dreaming, and she thought it was just phenomenal. So I had to have you on the podcast to talk about it. But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started with Salesforce and what you do.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So my journey started as a lot of ours as an accidental admin. I was working for a small family-run business who had Salesforce, and they were paying a consultant to basically be their full-time admin. And one day my manager walked into my office and said, "I don't want to pay them anymore. I need you to learn this." And I was like, "Okay."

Mike: "I suppose."

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Why not? So yeah, that's what started my journey. And I skilled up on Trailhead and I was on it two, three hours a day trying to figure out how to be an admin in Salesforce. And this was back at the initial transition from Classic to Lightning.

Mike: Ooh, fun.

Michelle Wolf: So half of my early batches are on Classic. There just wasn't a ton of Lightning stuff out there yet. So I would build a lot in Classic and then flip it over to Lightning to see what it looked like because they did like the Lightning interface, which was great. So that started my journey. And then when I decided to part ways with that company, I took a different position and paused my admin career. And then about five years ago or so, I had an opportunity to be a product SME for Salesforce. And I was like, "Yes, I miss this product. I miss doing this. I miss being able to make things better with just the click of the button. So let's go do this." And I jumped in both feet and never looked back. And so I've been an active admin for a little over five years now. And I'm a Flownatic. Anything I can automate, I am doing it.

Mike: I love it. Active admin as opposed to passive.

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: I don't know. So I love when you started because I remember those times and the reason there wasn't enough Lightning things is we were all writing it as fast as we could.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah, I know it.

Mike: It's kind of like learning to drive with a manual. And then they're like, "Oh, well, here's an automatic." And you're like, "Oh, I already know how to drive with a manual." I mean, if you knew how to do things in Classic, then doing stuff in Lightning was just that much easier, in my opinion anyway.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. I agree. I agree. And the user experience was better for my users. They liked the layout and the feel. It jived with their personalities better instead of that very formal grid-looking everything.

Mike: I mean, that was the internet at a certain period in time. And then it grew up and it was like your eyes don't have to squint with white space.

Michelle Wolf: Right.

Mike: Every field just went from tight polyester pants to sweatpants. And it was like, "Yay."

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: Let's talk about being a Flownatic because I've talked with Jen. I know Jen said she was in your session. I really think, I mean, outside of just it's so incredibly powerful, the amount of things that you can do on the Salesforce platform without writing a single line of code. Flow is one of those. And I remember it was 100 years ago that I saw Flow for the first time at Dreamforce when I was a customer. And I think they called it Business Process Management or something. And it was an app you had to download, and then you had to upload schemas to it. It's since graduated into a much more robust tool. But the nice thing is once you know that, I mean, caveat emptor because AI runs off of all the flows. I mean, if you're good at Flow, there's very few things you can't make Agentforce do. So tell me a little bit about why you built onboarding with Flow.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. The company I was with found themselves in a really big period of growth, which was really amazing. But the new hire classes were like 80 people. And I just could not bring myself to want to spend a week of my life just filling in these boxes to make new users. It was really so time-consuming. And one typo here, one missed field here. My validation rules didn't check out. It was just a pain. It's just very mind-numbing. And I was like, "There has to be a better way." And I w...