Time Based Automation did not run

SJ Sellers

Hello -

I have an automation that runs based on my "Due Date" column at 11pm.

The formula in the "Due Date" column returns today's date if it is Tuesday, otherwise it returns the next Tuesday. FORMULA: =TODAY() + MOD(7 - WEEKDAY(TODAY()) + 3, 7)

It has been running fine every Tuesday evening since early February, but did not run last week (Apr 19) and is causing a lot of downstream craziness.

Also strange is that the automation says "Last ran on Apr 25" (last night), but it did not. Neither automation action (copy rows or clear cells) was executed. And it should not have run last night, because the "Due Date" condition was not met (the date in the column is Apr 26, today)

Genevieve P.

Hi @SJ Sellers

How often do you open the sheet? The TODAY function needs a trigger to recognize what Today's date is, to then update in your sheet. There's a list of actions that will update a TODAY function in this article: TODAY Function

Is it possible that there wasn't anything that updated the formula last week?

SJ Sellers

Hi @Genevieve P.

As an update, the automation also did not run on Apr 26 - making this the second week in a row the automation failed to execute.

The sheet was updated on both Apr 19 and Apr 26.

Three reasons I am sure:

1. The screenshot of Cell History Below
2. I have a second automation that copies the rows when changed to another sheet. The copied rows have dates of Apr 19 and Apr 26
3. For the failure on the 26th, I made a screenshot of the Due Date column which is shown in my original post that shows Apr 26

Three items of note from this screenshot of Cell History:

1. The automation ran every Tuesday since February (truncated my screenshot for readability) except for the last two Tuesdays
2. The TIME the automation executed changed on April 12 - but the definition of the automation never changed. You can see on my original post the automation definition has not changed since Feb 16.
3. There were updates made on Apr 19 and Ap 26

Thank you so much for your help!

Genevieve P.

Hi @SJ Sellers

Since you made no changes to the workflow at all, and you can confirm that the trigger & conditions built into the workflow were met, I would suggest contacting Smartsheet Support about this issue and continuing to follow-up with them with any requested information.

They'll need the Sheet URL and the Workflow ID to be able to check the back-end and see what may be happening. It would also be helpful for them to know if you changed your personal Account Settings to a different timezone/location any time recently (which may account for the shift in hour from when it ran).

In the meantime, I would suggest creating a Duplicate of the workflow to see if this helps (and disable the original one, noting the time/date that you did so to Support). You may also want to split up your actions... ex. have the row copy over earlier in the evening in a separate workflow and have the clear cell happen later.

Thanks,

Genevieve

SJ Sellers

Hi @Genevieve P.

Thank you for your response and help as always!!! 😊

As a further update, this week the automation ran but the action was not captured in the Cell Audit.

I am assuming that splitting the actions would just be temporary for troubleshooting purposes? If a product defect is preventing two actions from being executed in the same workflow, I would expect that engineers would correct the defect so that workarounds don't need to be implemented, or explain why this is expected behavior.

Thanks again as always for your help and expertise!

Genevieve P.

Hi @SJ Sellers

Yes exactly, splitting up the workflows is a test for now. It shouldn't make a difference so if creating them separately changes the behaviour, then Support would need to know this so the engineers can look into what the cause may be.