👤 For all users
🔐 Available on Business, Enterprise and Unlimited plans
🎯 For those who manage processes with deadlines and SLAs
The deadline passes. Someone notices. The scramble begins. In processes with an SLA, this cycle repeats because the reminder did not exist, or arrived too late to change the outcome.
An automatic reminder is not an emergency notification. It is the proactive behavior that healthy processes already have built in: warning far enough in advance for the action to still solve the problem. In Pipefy, this is configurable with automations based on a date field. By the end of this article, you will know which type of trigger to use, when the Due Date field is enough and when you need a date field of your own.
📖 What you'll understand here:
Date-based automation versus event-based automation
Most automations fire when something happens: a card changes phase, a field is updated, a form is submitted. These are event-based automations. They react to an action.
Date-based automations work differently. They fire in relation to a card's date field: X days before, on the day, or X days after. No human action triggers them. They continuously check active cards and fire when the time condition is met.
When to use date-based automation:
- The process has a deadline that must be met and the team needs an advance warning.
- A card stalled for too long needs to be escalated automatically.
- A contract or license has an expiration date that requires renewal.
- A sales follow-up needs to happen X days after sending a proposal.
Date-based automations only work on active cards (not completed and not archived). If the card is moved to the final phase before the deadline, the automation does not fire. This is the correct behavior, but it is worth testing to confirm.
The Due Date field and when to go beyond it
Pipefy has a native Due Date field on every card. It appears at the top of the card and serves as a visual deadline reference. Automations can use this field as a trigger.
The Due Date field is enough when the process has a single relevant deadline per card and the reminder needs to be sent in relation to it. An IT ticket with a 48-hour SLA, a purchase request with a defined response deadline, a contract with a renewal date.
You need a custom date field when the process has multiple deadlines per card, or when the deadline relevant to the reminder is different from the card's completion deadline. Examples: supplier delivery date, document expiration date, date scheduled for an approval meeting. Each date field can have its own reminder automation.
Name date fields clearly. "Contract due date" and "Expected delivery date" are different fields with different automations. Generic names like "Date 1" create confusion in configuration and maintenance.
Email reminder versus internal notification
Pipefy offers two channels to get the reminder to whoever needs to act: email and internal notification on the platform.
Internal notification
Arrives inside Pipefy for team members. It appears in the notification bell. It works for teams that live inside the platform and follow Pipefy actively throughout the day. If the recipient does not open Pipefy often, the internal notification has low effectiveness.
Automatic email
Arrives in the recipient's inbox, inside or outside the platform. It is the right channel for reminders that need to reach people outside the team (a supplier, a requester, an approver who does not use Pipefy daily) or to make sure the warning does not go unnoticed.
The two channels can be combined in the same automation. A critical reminder can send an email to the external assignee and an internal notification to the process manager at the same time.
Automatic emails sent by Pipefy arrive with the platform's default sender. If the process requires the email to appear to come from a company address, this requires additional domain configuration.
How to configure a reminder X days before the deadline
Trigger: X days before the @Due Date field (or the custom date field that represents the process deadline).
Condition (optional): add a condition if the reminder should fire only for a subset of cards. Example: phase equal to "In progress" so it does not notify cards that have already been completed but still have a date filled in.
Action 1: send an email to the @Assignee email field with the subject and body defined in the automation.
Action 2 (optional): internally notify the member assigned to the card.
The value of "X days before" is set in the trigger configuration. There is no fixed documented limit, but the most common interval in processes with an SLA is between 1 and 5 days, depending on the real time the assignee needs to act.
Example: proposal follow-up 3 days before the deadline
A sales team sends proposals with a 10-day validity. Today, follow-up depends on each salesperson remembering to make contact. Some remember. Others do not.
The configuration: each proposal card has a "Proposal validity date" field filled in at the moment of sending. The automation fires 3 days before that date, sends an automatic email to the client's email field with a personalized reminder and internally notifies the person responsible for the card to follow up on the response.
The result: all follow-ups happen at the same moment, with the same lead time, regardless of who is responsible for the proposal. The process stops depending on individual memory.
If the client responds and the proposal is accepted before the deadline, move the card to the closing phase. The automation will not fire for cards that have already left the active flow. No additional configuration needed.
Before activating: three points to check
- The date field is being filled consistently. Date-based automation does not work if the field is empty. If filling it depends on a team member, add the field as required in the card's entry phase.
- The lead time makes sense for the process. A reminder 1 day before a 48-hour deadline is too late. A reminder 30 days before an annual renewal may be too early. Calibrate the interval based on the real time the assignee needs to act.
- The correct recipient is mapped. A notification to the person responsible for the card works when the card always has an assignee. If the card can be left without an assignee, use a fixed email as a contingency recipient.
