Reminders needing the same logic as Notifications

Kris Reinertson

I've found a limitation of the reminders and notifications and would like to request that one or the other be tweaked to solve my problem.

I want my contacts to receive an alert before/on/after a date but only if another columns checkbox is unchecked.

Originally, I thought that a notification would work. I set up many notifications which I thought would work as intended. Unfortunately, no one was receiving alerts. After looking into the issue, I noticed that notifications are only sent when a person updates/adds/deletes a row. In case I'm mistaken, I'll ask:

Q: Is there any type of Notification that can be triggered by a date field arriving at a determined date, i.e. 3 days after the date in a date field, without a person updating/adding/deleting a row?

After some testing, I did not find that Notifications can be triggered by the date field alone. So, I looked into Reminders. Unfortunately, Reminders do not have the logic I need to be a solution. I can set Reminders based on a date field, and the date alone will trigger a Reminder. However, I cannot at this time specify that I'd only like the Reminder to be sent on x days before/after the date field or today if a checkbox in another column has not been checked. Is this correct or am I missing a way to apply more logic to Reminders?

Are there any work-arounds?

It seems that this request to add this functionality could be completed in one of two ways. 1) Allow the Notifications to be sent based on a date field arriving at a specified X before/after date or today regardless of whether a person updates/adds/deletes a row, or 2) add logic to Reminders.

I'm sure that I am not alone in wanting this functionality. I can see many applications. For me, I'd like my managers to receive alerts when a task is a week past due AND has not yet been completed (Checkbox not checked). I'd also like to set alert staff of upcoming due dates, but I want to set the alerts to only remind them of an impending due date IF the task has not yet been completed so as not to overburden their inbox and make them more likely to overlook Smartsheet notifications. 

 

 

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Kris,

You're not alone on conditional reminders—our Product team recognizes the demand for this feature and is exploring development for this. I don't have an ETA for this, but our Product team looks at customer feedback and demand when prioritizing new features to develop. Submit a Product Enhancement Request using the form under Quick links on the right of the community site to increase demand.

With that being said, what some Smartsheet users do is add an IF statement to a date column that will populate date based on conditions met, for example:

=IF(Complete1 = 0, [Due Date]1 + 7)

You can then possibly set a reminder based off that date column.