Work Notes added on Parent Incident should remain only at Incident level.

[Pavithra_Raghu]

I am seeking guidance on how to ensure that Work Notes entered on a parent Incident remain exclusively at the Incident level and are not automatically propagated or synchronized to any associated Incident Tasks. The objective is to preserve the existing Work Notes functionality for tasks while maintaining a strict separation between journal entries at the Incident and Incident Task levels. In other words, Work Notes added to the Incident should not appear on its tasks under any circumstance, and task-level Work Notes behavior should remain unaffected. What configuration or best practice approach is recommended in ServiceNow to achieve this separation?

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@Pavithra_Raghu 

how is the copy happening?

If it's OOTB then disable that BR or logic

If it's custom then discuss with your customer and disable that

💡 If my response helped, please mark it as correct ✅ and close the thread 🔒— this helps future readers find the solution faster! 🙏

[Aditya_hublikar]

Hello @Pavithra_Raghu ,

As per my understanding , there is no any OOTB functionality which will sync incident worknotes and incident task worknotes. Please ensure that is there any BR/flow which will enforcing this behaviour.If yes then disabled that to prevent this from happening.

If my response helps you then mark it as helpful and accept as solution.

regards,

Aditya,

Technical Consultant

[Aditya_hublikar]

Hello @Pavithra_Raghu ,

Sorry custom word were missing in above reply . Ensure is there any custom BR which enforcing that.

[vaishali231]

hey @Pavithra_Raghu 

By default, Work Notes from a parent Incident do not flow down to Incident Tasks. So if you’re seeing that behavior, it’s definitely coming from a customization.

Most commonly, this happens because of:

A Business Rule copying fields

A Flow Designer flow triggered on Incident update

A Workflow activity

Some script referencing  current.work_notes

I would start by searching for work_notes in Business Rules and Flows related to incident and incident_task. In many cases, you’ll find something like:

task.work_notes = current.work_notes;

If that exists, the best fix is simply to remove that line or adjust the logic so only specific non-journal fields are copied.

I would strongly recommend not deleting entries from sys_journal_field as a workaround. That can create audit and upgrade issues. It’s much cleaner to stop the copy at the source instead of cleaning it up afterward.

If you really need a safeguard, you could add a before update Business Rule on incident_task to block non-interactive updates to work_notes, but ideally fixing the original automation is the right approach.

*************************************************************************************************************************************

If this response helps, please mark it as Accept as Solution and Helpful.

Doing so helps others in the community and encourages me to keep contributing.

Regards

Vaishali Singh