Time passage alert/notification?

[Jamie_Marbury]

Hello, we’re fairly new to Airtable and not super familiar with abilities we are looking for. After searching and coming up dry, I’m hoping someone here may be able to help us.

I was able to find a set of formulas for a length of time passed on a record, which is great, but to go further, what we are looking for is to be alerted via notification or email or similar when a specific timeframe has been exceeded (such as 6 months). Is this doable? Are there specific places we might be able to find this information?

Thanks!

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Jamie_Marbury - a couple of ways you can do this (at least):

1. Have an alert field in the table:

Using a formula such as:

IF(DATETIME_DIFF(TODAY(), {Created Date}, 'days') > 180, '🔥🔥 Overdue 🔥🔥', '')

2. If you are a paid plan that includes Blocks, you could use the SendGrid block to send you an email alert when a specific timeframe has been exceeded. You would set up a new grid view for this with a filter such as this:

You can then reference this view in the SendGrid block configuration and send emails out for each record (note that the view needs to have an email field in it so that this can be referenced in the send - doesn’t need to be the same email address for each record though).

I’m looking at the SendGrid block for the first time and it works OK, although it seems that you have to manually execute it, i.e. it won’t periodically check for records in the view on an automated basis. It also looks like it doesn’t keep track of emails already sent, so if you send to records 1 and 2 today, then tomorrow record 3 also qualifies, all 3 will be sent when you next execute this, not just the new record. This might be good or bad depending upon your use case. It is possible that other users have more experience with the SendGrid block and might be able to comment further on this.

Hope this helps

JB

[JonathanBowen]

A 3rd option would be Zapier. Airtable and Zapier have a trigger based on when a new record is added to a view (same idea as mentioned above) and Zapier can send out an email on this event.

This is probably going to be a better option TBH - it wouldn’t need manual intervention and, I think, would get over the issue of records being sent multiple times.

JB

[Jamie_Marbury]

Hi @JonathanBowen, thanks for the responses. I tried out your first option and it seemed to work really well - I integrated Slack to send a notification once the Overdue response was added. We only have the free plan so number 2 wouldn’t work.

To be honest, I actually tried Zapier (and IfThisThenThat) and for whatever reason, even though I did the specified action from the view I set, I never received any emails on either. Wasn’t sure what could possibly be the issue there. But regardless, your first suggestion seems to have worked for us, so thank you!

Jamie