A four-person bookkeeping firm onboards about three new clients a month. Each one needs an engagement letter, bank statements, a kickoff call and a client portal set up.
When those tasks live in email threads and a shared spreadsheet, a client can wait a week for an engagement letter because nobody knew it was theirs, and the Monday meeting becomes a round of "where are we with…?".
A Trello board fixes most of that on the free plan. But boards have a small, annoying failure of their own, and it's the one this post is about: people drag finished cards to Done and forget to tick them complete. The due dates keep showing as overdue, the board looks worse than the work really is, and someone spends ten minutes every Monday tidying it.
One free automation rule hands that job to Trello. Here's the board first, then the rule. The firm and its clients are made up; every click is from the real Trello free plan.
The board, in five minutes
- Create > Create board, name it Client onboarding, check the Workspace and click Create.
- Add four lists: To do, In progress, Waiting on client, Done.
- Add one card per onboarding task under To do, starting each with the client name (Cobalt Legal: engagement letter).
- Name a label: open a card, Labels, the pencil next to red, type Urgent, Save. Then tick it on the cards that need it. Trello's six colours start unnamed; you name one once and the whole board can use it.
- Add a deadline: open a card, Dates, pick a due date, Save. Due dates show on the card front, and turn green when the card is marked complete.
The list that does the most work is Waiting on client. Mixed into In progress, time spent waiting for a client's bank statements looks like slow work by the team. In its own list, stalled work is visible at a glance.
From here, moving a card is the status update. Nobody has to ask.
The rule: when a card lands in Done, mark it complete
A Trello rule is a trigger (when something happens) plus one or more actions (what Trello does). Trello walks you through Select trigger, Select action, Review and save.
- Open the board and click the lightning bolt (Automation) in the board header.
- Click Rules > Create automation > + Add Trigger.
- On the Card Move tab, find when a card is added to list, type and pick Done.
- Change by me to by anyone, and click +.
- In Select Action, click Dates, then + next to mark the card as complete.
- Click Save.
The saved rule reads:
when a card is added to list "Done" by anyone, mark the card as complete
Test it before you trust it: close the panel and drag a practice card (in the lesson, the Cobalt Legal card) to Done. It ticks itself complete and its due date turns green, without anyone opening it.
The one setting people get wrong
"by me" vs "by anyone". The trigger defaults to by me, which only fires when you move a card. On a team board that means the rule works perfectly when you test it and silently does nothing when a colleague finishes a task. Set it to by anyone.
Is it really free?
Yes. Automation is on Trello's free plan with a monthly allowance of rule runs. Reports at the bottom of the Automation panel shows how many you've used. This rule uses one run per finished card, so check Reports once after a busy month.
Good next rules
Once the first one works, the same trigger-then-action pattern covers most of the remaining Monday chores:
- When a card is added to To do, add your standard onboarding checklist.
- When someone is added to a card, move it to In progress.
Keep it to a few rules everyone understands. A board that moves cards in surprising ways is as confusing as one that's out of date.
Practice it step by step
The lesson, Trello: Mark Work Complete Automatically with a Free Rule, walks through the rule on real Trello screens and touches no account. The board itself is the module before it: Trello: Track Client Onboarding on One Team Board. Both are in the free Trello for Teams course, with a one-page Trello cheat sheet and a short explainer on automation rules.
Practice it step by step, free: https://learn.ynteractive.com/content/trello-butler-done-rule
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