Date Based Automation Did Not Send Automated Email

We have a date-based automation that sends an automated email to our employees. The automations trigger is "When a date is reached" and that date is the date in a specific cell.

The date in the CLIN 2 First Reminder cell is a date that is calculated by a formula. The formula looks at the hard-coded date in the CLIN 2 Technical Updates Due Date COB Excel and subtracts 6 business days.

However, the automation did not work, and the automated email was not sent to our employees.

Any advice as to why this automation could have failed would be greatly appreciated.

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io_DR

@PittsburghRob - I have a couple of questions:

Can you look at the cell history and see the time the date changed on that cell?
Are there any conditions after the trigger?

Thank you!

Naeem Ejaz

Try to manually run this automation and test it on your email.

PittsburghRob

Hi @Naeem Ejaz I received the automated email, and the automation works correctly when I run it manually.

Naeem Ejaz

Have the employees been added to Smartsheet, and do they have licensed accounts, or are they only set up with Viewer rights?

Paul Newcome

When was the tigger date added to the sheet? Have you checked cell history to see if maybe it was added late?

PittsburghRob

Hi @Paul Newcome the trigger date has been in place since May of last year.

My teammate and I cannot see a reason why this automation did not run from everything we can tell it should have worked.

PittsburghRob

@Naeem Ejaz yes, all the employees have been added to Smartsheet. The vast majority of our employees are not licensed users but have editor cannot share rights to the sheets they need to access. Licensed users also did not receive the automated email.

Paul Newcome

Has it worked on other rows?

PittsburghRob

Yes, the automations have worked well in other rows. However, we made adjustments to the sheet before the Holidays to prevent the automated email from being sent when our employees did not need to complete their reporting work in Smartsheet.

The adjustments we made was to remove the dates in the three highlighted columns and adding N/A. Doing so prevented the automated email from being sent, but since then this automation has been "broken". I can understand why the previous row's automated messages did not send, but the final row was only dependent on the date in the CLIN 2 Technical Updates Due COB Excel column. The date in that column was manually ended back in May 2025. Theres a formula behind the dates in CLIN 2 First Reminder and CLIN 2 Second Reminder which subtracts 6 workdays and 3 workdays from the date in CLIN 2 Technical Updates Due Date cell respectively. So, based on my understanding the automation should have worked even after we made the previous modifications.

Paul Newcome

My first suggestion would be to "undo" the changes you made before the holiday and maybe insert a test row that will trigger sooner rather than later to see if that fixes it. If reverting back to what was working still doesn't help, you may need to reach out to Support.

SueinSpain

Just a thought - make the field "restrict to date only" column and remove the n/a just leaving them blank / empty if not wanted as that may be throwing it off.

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