Script or Automation?

[Harvey_Mason]

Hi guys,

I’m wondering if what I am looking to do can be done via an out the box automation, or if I need a script writing. Or both!

In short, we are a villa rental agency and send an email to our property owners regularly to ask them to update us with their latest availability. We are then updating the ‘last updated on’ date field at property record level as and when we receive the updates.

I was then going to run an automation to send an email to the owner when the ‘last updated on’ date is more than 7 days ago. This would then run in the background and would email owners accordingly when the availability data is out of date by 7 days, correct?

However, in some cases owners have more than one property and may have recently updated us on one of them, but not the others, so ideally we would implement something that could check the owner record first for the total number of properties linked to them, then check the last updated on date for each and then bring across the name of each property that is out of date into the email. For example if an owner has 3 properties and 2 are out of date, the automation would only include the names of the two properties that are out of date in the email body…

Does anyone know if this would be possible?

Many thanks in advance!
Harvey

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Harvey_Mason

Harvey_Mason:

I was then going to run an automation to send an email to the owner when the ‘last updated on’ date is more than 7 days ago. This would then run in the background and would email owners accordingly when the availability data is out of date by 7 days, correct?

Yes, you can do this with an automation.

Harvey_Mason:

We are then updating the ‘last updated on’ date field

It sounds like you are doing this manually, but there is a “last modified time” field which would update automatically when the record is updated - maybe one to consider if you are not already using this.

To answer the main question though - some of this might come down to your base design. Do you have a table for owners and a table for properties (with a linked field)? If so, I think you are going to need to use a script (which could be part of an automation) to “gather” the data before pushing it to the email.

If you wanted to have an automation without a script, it might just be easier to send an email per property, acknowledging that some owners might get multiple emails if they have multiple properties.

[Harvey_Mason]

Thank you @JonathanBowen , this is really useful…

Re our base design: Yes, we have a table for the owner contact records and a separate table for the properties. We then use link fields to link the two together. And as mentioned earlier, some owners have more than one property linked to them, particularly property managers who can have up to 15/20 properties.

As you say, it sounds like we would need a script to gather the information, but that would really personalise the communication, so I think it would be worth it.

What are next steps in regards to you quoting to do this for us?

Many thanks

[JonathanBowen]

:thumbs_up: - will DM you.

Jonathan