in this video we walk through the steps of converting a task to a checklist record but what is a checklist record and if you can put a checklist on any record in service now why is there a need for a checklist record in order to have a checklist Pro checklist appear it needs to be associated with some record a checklist Pro record is a record with a few simple but useful fields it has a number to uniquely identify it a state which reflects it being open or complete or canceled a short description which briefly summarizes what it contains an assignment group and an assigned to user field a HTML field which can contain more details about the record formatted in HTML and lastly a parent field which references another record in servicenow that this checklist record is associated with if a checklist is placed on a record in service now then an end user does not have ACL permissions to access this would prevent them from seeing the checklist by putting a checklist on a checklist record and then associating that record with the desired record that may be restricted to the end user it allows the end user to update the checklist this opens the door for widespread business workflow digitization efforts to continue and selectively use checklist records instead of tasks to prevent The Runaway subscription cost growth incurred by always using tasks and having to convert users that would otherwise not truly be fulfillers or business stakeholders with this powerful set of tools for solving business problems developers can still be creative problem solvers while at the same time being good stewards of servicenow license costs let's take a look at how we can convert a task in a workflow to use a checklist record as an example we've created a simple catalog item for assigning work to a group to complete we provide an option to use a checklist record on the form so that the underlying workflow and it can illustrate the two possible Paths of execution one that utilizes the catalog task the other that utilizes the checklist record we will look closely to see what's involved in converting from a task to a checklist record we'll choose the security guards group as the one to complete this work since this is a good example of a group of people that are not truly fulfillers and are a good candidate to have a checklist record replacement the task exposes a required variable called hours to complete that the assigned group must fill in before they can close the task when we click the assign to field to pick someone from the group to complete this work we notice that no users are shown that's because none of the security guards are ITIL users and thus the only way for this group to complete the work is by granting Ito role to these group members and thus we've increased our fulfiller subscriber license count let's take a look at the catalog task workflow activity to see how the group was assigned and the customized short and long description text was created notice the simple low code references to catalog item variables intermixed with text to set the short and long description fields now let's take a look at what's involved if we were to replace this task and eternal internal functionality with the checklist record you'll notice that there are two activities needed first a run script which is where we will set workflow scratch Pad variables used for setting the group short description and HTML fields of the checklist record and second the checklist Pro record itself which is a built-in workflow and subflow equivalent in flow designer that accepts these workflow scratch Pad variables and is used to set the variables in the checklist record simply drag the checklist Pro record from the workflows onto your data grammar and you will be able to use the checklist Pro record the map field return value field should be used should be a workflow scratch Pad value to see the results of whether the checklist record was successfully completed or if it closed incomplete the parent table is the servicenow table that the checklist record is associated with and the parent sysid field should be the sysid of that record the checklist field is optional if specified checklist Pro will create the specified checklist items and Link it to the checklist record if left empty you can let the checklist Pro engine determine which checklist if any should appear with the checklist record the short description assignment groups this ID and HTML fields are filled with the workflow scratch Pad variables set in the Run script activity that's it you successfully created a checklist record alternative to the task record let's see what this looks like when we execute we re-execute this same request but select checklist record option on the request form the service portal we can see the checklist menu item which appears only if there are open checklist records that are assigned to you or is not assigned to a user but assigned to one of your groups checklist Pro also sends email notifications which include a convenience link directly to the checklist record checklist Pro also provides a checklist overview dashboard that has personalized reports to show open checklist records assigned to you to your groups and to all open checklist records by group on the checklist record itself you can see the same required hours to complete item which came from the checklist we passed into the checklist record to complete the work you must assign it to a person and click the save button then click the complete or cancel button depending on how the work was resolved or not