Stage gates & automation
Require fields before a deal advances, and bind triggers to actions per pipeline stage.
Pact gives you two ways to keep deals clean and move work forward automatically: stage gates that validate a deal before it advances, and automation rules that bind a trigger to an action. They are independent mechanisms — use either, or both.
Stage gates and required fields
Each stage can require certain fields. When someone advances a deal into that stage, Pact validates those fields. If any are missing, the move is blocked and the missing fields are listed with friendly, human-readable labels.
A few rules make gates practical rather than punishing:
- Fill inline. You can supply the missing fields in the same advance action — no need to leave the board, edit the deal, and come back.
- Backward moves are never blocked. Only forward and closing moves are gated, so you can always pull a deal back to an earlier stage.
- Managers can override. A manager can push a gated move through with a written reason. The override is audited.
Won/loss reason on close
Closing a deal into a won or lost stage can require a won/loss reason — but only when that pipeline has a reason taxonomy defined. An empty taxonomy never dead-ends a close, so closing always stays possible.
Automation rules
Automation rules bind a trigger to an action, scoped to a pipeline and stage.
| Triggers | Actions |
|---|---|
| Time | Create a task |
| Signal | Notify |
| Attribute change | Run an AI agent |
| Require review | |
| Move stage | |
| Call a webhook |
Each rule has an enable toggle and a fire count so you can see how often it has run. Rules can be dry-run / evaluated before you rely on them, letting you confirm what a rule would do against real data.
Auto-execution is feature-flagged
Live automatic execution of rules is controlled by a feature flag. You can create and evaluate rules even when auto-execution is turned off — they simply will not fire on their own until the flag is enabled.
Choosing between them
Reach for stage gates when you want to guarantee data quality at a transition — required fields, mandatory close reasons. Reach for automation rules when you want a side effect to happen in response to a trigger — a task, a notification, an agent run, or an outbound webhook.