Can Automatons be Triggered by Date Comparison without a Record Updates?

[Brian_Hendel]

Hi! Newbie here! Loving AT to far.

I want to automatically notify my sales team 2 days before a trial is set to expire, so I have a TRIAL START DATE date field, and a DAYS LEFT IN TRIAL formula that does a DATEADD and DATEDIFF to get a days count, that counts from 30 down to zero. That is, your 30-day trial starts today, and every day when I log in to Airtable, I expect the DAYS LEFT IN TRIAL to decrement by one. This all works fine.

My question is, can I create an Automation trigger, based on this DAYS LEFT IN TRIAL, checking for when it reaches 0, and initiates the automation? Note that no actual “update event” happens anywhere in the DB. This is just day by day passage of time. I am worried that the developers of AT would require some kind of database update / change for triggers to get calculated.

Thanks! : )

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Yes, an automation can be run based on a date comparison without a record update. Use the when record meets conditions trigger. Your {DAYS LEFT IN TRIAL} formula field probably includes either the TODAY() function or the NOW() function. Although these functions do not update continuously, but they do update periodically even when you are not logged in–most users experience a lag of 5-15 minutes between updates of NOW().

Note that these functions are based on GMT time, if your users are in a significantly different timezone, your users might experience the dates reaching zero at a different time of day than you expect.

[kuovonne]

Airtable has now published how often the NOW() function updates in this support article.

@ScottWorld, @Justin_Barrett

[Justin_Barrett]

Interesting. I ran a test the other day, and it was updating every 10 minutes on average. At times the interval was very precise, other times it was a minute or two longer or shorter. Only one time do I recall seeing an update interval of five minutes. I don’t recall for certain whether the base was open or closed, though I think I had closed it specifically to test how that affected the update.

[ScottWorld]

Thanks for discovering this updated paragraph, @kuovonne! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :raised_hands: :star2:

That’s fantastic that they’ve given us extra clarification on this! This is extremely helpful! :slightly_smiling_face:

Two things, if the Airtable team is reading this:

1. It would be great if the NOW() information was updated on the formula field reference page as well.

2. It doesn’t mention how often NOW() updates when API calls depend on it, but I’m assuming that it’s the “once per hour” timeframe.

[ScottWorld]

p.s. I think that if they really want to compete against the 80-pound gorilla that just entered the room to try to crush Airtable, they’re probably going to need to add in precise scheduling features into the Automations.

[kuovonne]

I think this update documentation is very new, and it is possible that the documentation isn’t quite accurate.

As a former technical writer, I tend to take any published information both seriously and with a grain of salt, depending on how much review the info got from subject mater experts who are not always available.

Neither interval quite matches test that I performed last week, but Airtable could have easily changed things since then.

Btw, I was typing very late at night when I tagged y’all. If you know anyone else who wold find this conversation interesting, feel free to tag them. @Jason

[ScottWorld]

Justin_Barrett:

Only one time do I recall seeing an update interval of five minutes. I don’t recall for certain whether the base was open or closed, though I think I had closed it specifically to test how that affected the update.

Yeah, it’s strange. What they wrote there doesn’t match my experience either. :man_shrugging:t2:

kuovonne:

As a former technical writer, I tend to take any published information both seriously and with a grain of salt.

Ha, I love this!! :joy: :grinning_face_with_sweat: And makes perfect sense.

kuovonne:

Neither interval quite matches test that I performed last week, but Airtable could have easily changed things since then.

Ah, good point.

[Jason]

Hi everyone, thanks for the input around this!

ScottWorld:

It would be great if the NOW() information was updated on the formula field reference page as well.

Good idea - we’ll add this to our formula field reference.

kuovonne:

Neither interval quite matches test that I performed last week, but Airtable could have easily changed things since then.

The update interval does vary a bit, but should range around 5-10 minutes. We can update the reference in that article to better reflect that approximate range.

[kuovonne]

Jason:

Good idea - we’ll add this to our formula field reference.

While you are at it, could you also document when TODAY() gets updated? I assume that it is only once per day around midnight GMT, but it would be nice to know for sure.