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What It Is

Schedule is a native Zapier app you can use for recurring tasks. Trigger an action every day of the month, every day of the week or every single day. You can also select the hour of the day. If you're a developer, this is similar to a crontab, cronjob or cron.

How It Works

With Schedule by Zapier you have the following triggers:

Available triggers for Schedule by Zapier

There’s not much need to explain what each one does, as it’s pretty self-explanatory. You can trigger a Zap every hour, day, week or month.

NOTE: You can skip ahead to the Tips and Tricks section to see how you can use workarounds to make your Zaps a bit more flexible.

What You Can Build With It

Rather than come up with workflows, I’ll refer you to some of the many existing posts in the Zapier Community where Schedule by Zapier is used as the trigger:

How to turn a Zap OFF and ON with a schedule

Schedule recurring messages in Slack with Zapier

Check spreadsheet records on a schedule

Schedule a Meeting on First Working Day Of Next Month

And if you look here you’ll see all of the Community posts that are tagged with Schedule by Zapier 

Tips and Tricks

Here are some workflows that are not necessarily obvious, but that can be achieved with Schedule by Zapier.

I need to trigger on only certain days of the week when using the "Every Day" Trigger.

To do this, you would want to set up a filter step after your trigger that looks like this:

Day of the Week Filter

You can then use the following numbers to correspond with the day of the week you'd like to trigger on:

  • 0 - Monday
  • 1 - Tuesday
  • 2 - Wednesday
  • 3 - Thursday
  • 4 - Friday
  • 5 - Saturday
  • 6 - Sunday

Can I Trigger a Zap Quarterly or Annually?

You can! To do so you'll want to set use the "Every Month" trigger, then add a filter step to ensure the Zap triggers less frequently. For example, if I want my Zap to trigger annually on April 15th (Tax day!), I add a filter so the Zap only triggers on month '4':


For quarterly Zaps I'll do the same thing, just add more filters with OR logic. So if I want to trigger a Zap every quarter (March, June, September, December) on the 15th, the filters would look like this:

You can make the month or the day of the month whatever you like, just tweak the selections in your filter step to fit your needs!

Can I set a time that is not on the hour using the "Every Day" Trigger?

Right now, you can only choose a time that's on the hour using the Schedule Every Day Trigger:
on the hour

You can add a Delay Action afterwards to hold the task for less than an hour. For example, if you want the zap to trigger at 10:25, you could schedule it to run at 10 and then "Delay Until" 10:25.

Note: because tasks queue, it is not guaranteed that the zap will run precisely to the minute. They should run within a few minutes of what you schedule.

Another workaround solution for this is to use Google Calendar instead. Simply set up your event recurring at your chosen time on a Google Calendar, then use Google Calendar "Event Start" as your Trigger.

event start at the trigger

Hi! How can I use Schedule to trigger every month on the last day? Will setting "Every month on the 31st" work…? Thanks!


Hi! How can I use Schedule to trigger every month on the last day? Will setting "Every month on the 31st" work…? Thanks!

 

Hey @xuan-minh 

 

Please check out Cronfree Time Scheduler

https://zapier.com/apps/cronfree-time-scheduler/integrations

 

You can do every month on the 31st.

 

You can also do every month on the 11th, 21st, 31st at 1am, 4am and 7pm.


How can I schedule something like the first Thursday of every month?


Great question, @IcarusZaps!

You could achieve that by adding a filter alongside the Schedule by Zapier trigger. There’s a related topic in Community that explains how this approach here:

Although it refers to triggering on the first Monday of a month you could use the same approach to get it to trigger on the first Thursday instead.

Hope that helps to get you pointed in the right direction. If you run into any issues or have further questions just let us know! 🙂


I have a schedule trigger setup to ‘lookup’ a spreadsheet on a daily basis. The trigger date on the look up value is using the “pretty date, Sep 18 2024”. Will the pretty date change every day or will it continue using Sep, 18 2024?


Hi @cliffordinho 👋

As long as the pretty date is coming from a mapped (selected) field and hasn’t been manually typed in then yes, the date value used in the search action would change to the relevant date for each day. So tomorrow it would be Sep 19 2024, the next day Sep 20 2024 and so on.

Hope that helps to clarify things. Do let us know if you have any further questions at all. 🙂


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