Notify team when too many records per status

[Diane_Martinez]

How can I detect the number of records in each status:

• Todo
• In progress
• Done

So that I can notify team members when there’s too many in a column. Example: if more than 5 In progress, notify team
Any suggestions?

[kuovonne]

This is not a straightforward task if your status field is a single-select field.

You could have a scheduled automation that runs periodically and uses a “find records” action to determine how many records are in a given status, then a conditional action to send the notification. However, this will result in lots of wasted automation runs and there will be a delay on the notifications depending on the frequency of the automation.

Another option is to convert the single-select field to a linked record field. Then in the new [Statuses] table, you can have rollup or count fields to say how many records are in that status. Finally, trigger your automation off the number in the count field.

[Ben_Young1 · Accepted solution]

Hey @Diane_Martinez!

This should be pretty straightforward!
There are a ton of really cool and in-depth approaches you could take to accomplish this.

Here’s the most barebones method I can think of.

---

Here we have a single table to hold our Project records.

We also have our single-select field with our project statuses.

With this, we’ll set up an automation.
I will set the trigger to look for when a record matches a condition.
We’ll point the trigger to look at when records’ Status field is set to “In Progress.”

From here, I will create a Find Records action that will look for every record that is also set to “In Progress.”

With this, we’ll set up a conditional automation group.
We’ll have this group run only if the number of records found is equal to or greater than five.

Now, for the sake of an example, I’ll create a Slack notification to myself that will alert me to when there are five or more records that are In Progress.

Here’s the final result:

In my example, I have 6 records that meet that condition.

---

This is just one of many ways that you could do this.
It really just depends on what your specific implementation and workflows look like.

Super cool rabbit hole to jump down into if you’re curious.

[kuovonne]

Ben.Young:

This should be pretty straightforward!
There are a ton of really cool and in-depth approaches you could take to accomplish this.

I stand corrected. This is a cool way of doing this.

Depending on how many statuses there are and whether or not records are created with statuses you might be able to bundle all the status checks into a single automation with a “when record updated” trigger and conditional actions for each status.

Also note that this system will generate an email notification for every record in a status with too many records. If many records enter the status before the number of records goes down, you might be bombarded with emails.

[Diane_Martinez]

You folks are amazing. My brain was so fried last night, I just couldn’t think of a way. I can’t believe I forgot about records length :woman_facepalming:
Thank you, thank you!!!