Salesforce Flow has become the key and default declarative automation tool on Salesforce. Flows offer significant benefits over using Apex in many situations such as maintainability, ease of use, reduced dependency on developers, lower cost, faster deliverability and improved visibility when debugging.

However, it's not always the best idea to migrate Apex to Flows. Scenarios such as complex logic, asynchronous operations, scalability concerns, performance-critical operations and logic requiring Apex-exclusive capabilities are all valid reasons to retain Apex.

While it may technically be possible to migrate certain Apex methods, like those in LWC handlers using Flows for DML operations, doing so can increase complexity and unnecessary dependencies, and may not be a sensible tradeoff.

This solution guide aims to help you identify Apex you may want to migrate and how to do it seamlessly.

Not all Apex is a good candidate for migration to Flow. To help document and prioritise Apex that can be migrated, create the following MetaFields in Elements to help support your migration.
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The first step to migrating Apex to Flow or even just improving your Apex should be done in Analytics 360. Here we can gain a high-level view of the orgs’ automations. This provides a comprehensive analysis of apex classes to outline key insights on where to focus and prioritise what to migrate. You can use analytics 360 to break down your Apex by:

Once you've identified which Apex classes and triggers are candidates for migration, the next step is to record those decisions inside Elements.cloud for alignment and tracking.

Use custom MetaFields to:

Before finalizing migration candidates, verify each class or method’s dependencies to ensure they are safe to migrate.

Use Elements.cloud to:

🎯 Goal: get a list of the Apex that can be migrated, how complex that migration would be and what the impacted dependencies are.

With dependencies confirmed and MetaFields filled in, build a custom metadata view in the Elements Metadata Dictionary to manage and monitor migration progress.

Recommended fields for the view:

This view can act as your Apex migration dashboard, allowing you to:

From this custom metadata view you can use the assessed Apex to write User Stories to document each migration. In the story we can attach related metadata items such as dependent classes and triggers and describe the changes that may need to be made. This approach ensures that the migration work is tracked and easily accessed by any stakeholders or any technical resources.

Once you’ve confirmed which Apex classes and triggers to migrate, the next step is to design how their logic will be replicated in Flow. This can be done using an Elements.cloud architecture diagram, where you can visually map out the new Flow structure and understand how it relates to the existing automation landscape.

In most cases, a trigger calling a handler method will convert into a Record-Triggered Flow. Within the diagram, start by laying out the trigger conditions: the object, the DML operation (create, update, etc.), and whether it runs before or after save. Use the original handler logic to define the entry criteria for the Flow. Designing this in a diagram allows you to quickly visualize how a single Apex method might split into multiple Flows or how multiple classes might be combined into one more streamlined Flow.

As you map out each method, diagram the corresponding Flow logic blocks—such as loops, assignments, DML actions, and decisions—mirroring the original Apex behavior. By capturing this in an Elements diagram, you avoid the need to rebuild Flows repeatedly in Salesforce, enabling faster iterations, validation and collaboration across teams before anything is committed to the org.

A major advantage of this design-first approach is the ability to see how Flows interact across objects. What initially appears to be a single migration effort may involve overlapping logic from multiple triggers or handler methods. With the full object-level view that the architecture diagram provides, you can assess how automation impacts the same object, identify shared logic that could be refactored into Subflows, and ensure new Flows won’t conflict with or duplicate existing automation.

To validate the design, you can even use existing Apex test classes to simulate Flow inputs and logic paths, helping confirm the design holds up under real scenarios—before any development begins.

The final step in the Apex-to-Flow migration planning process is to ensure you have a fully documented Elements.cloud Story for each migration effort. This Story is the central hub that ties together all the analysis and design work you've completed so far, ensuring the implementation team has everything they need to confidently build and test the new Flow—and update the Apex where required.

Each Story should clearly identify:

By finalizing Stories in this way, you ensure each migration task is fully scoped, technically validated, and easy to assign. You also enable seamless collaboration between architects, developers, and admins, all working from a shared, structured record of the migration plan. This approach reduces risk and enables long-term traceability for compliance and governance.
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