Weekly Automation occurred day late, why?

James Mehrtens

Hi

I am setting up a system to automatically track the weekly change in a log, and requires more than one sheet to pull off. Timing is very important to ensure the right information gets copied/cleared/used in formulas.

However most of the automation went off without a hitch is seems, except one step failed to trigger at the right time, instead activating a day and four hours later, breaking the whole system.

Any idea why this happened? How to prevent it?

Jeff Reisman

@James Mehrtens Smartsheet can be weird with time zones. I'm guessing you're on the east coast, and your Smartsheet is connecting to west coast servers, and something got messed up. You might want to go in and recreate the automation and delete this one.

Kelly Moore

Hey James

Jeff is right, smartsheet can have some timezone issues. Typically I bump up against this quirkiness with the system fields (Created or Modified), and only in a specific time window each day. I have seen unexpected results with automations when the sheet owner is in a different timezone and the automation kicks off in their time zone and not mine. Was this the first time you ran your synchronized automations? If they have been running, have you made any changes to the start time? it seems the system would have failed before if no changes have been made.

If the automation was running at midnight it would be easier to explain than this failure at noon.