Scheduled triggers

1. Scheduled triggers

Welcome back. Last video we picked a trigger family. Now we wire one up — configuring Recurrence, the trigger you reach for when the flow runs on the clock, not in response to data changes.

2. What scheduled triggers are for

Scheduled triggers are about time, not about events in source systems. If the work needs to happen every morning, every hour, every Monday, or every quarter, you want a Recurrence trigger. A common pattern in this course is the daily sweep, where you wake up once a day, look for records that need attention, do something about each one, then go back to sleep. It follows the same shape every weekday. Scheduled triggers also fit cleanup jobs, digest emails, end-of-month batches, or anything where the cadence is the thing that matters, not a real-world event.

3. The four Recurrence settings

Open the Recurrence trigger and you see four settings. Frequency is the unit, which can be minute, hour, day, week, or month. At the fast end, minute and hour are for live syncing or polling. Day is the most common for business workflows like digest emails, end-of-day batches, and the renewal sweep we'll build. If you only need something once a week or once a month, those options keep runs to a minimum. Interval is how many of those units between runs. For example, once a day means Frequency Day, Interval one. Time zone is the zone your start time is read in. And Start time is when the first run fires; every subsequent run is exactly Interval units after the previous. Get these four right and the trigger is reliable for years.

4. Time zone isn't optional

Here's the setting that quietly breaks more flows than any other. The default time zone on a new Recurrence trigger is UTC. A flow set to fire at 8 AM in UTC fires at 6 PM in Brisbane. A maker who meant 8 AM Brisbane time gets a flow that runs while everyone's asleep, and they often don't realize for weeks, because the flow itself looks fine in run history. Daylight saving makes it worse. A maker in London who pinned the trigger to UTC sees the flow fire at 8 AM local in winter and 9 AM local in summer, a silent drift that happens twice a year. Time zone isn't optional. Set it explicitly, every time.

5. Too often vs too rarely

The last decision is cadence. A flow that runs every minute burns through your daily run budget and almost always finds nothing has changed. A flow that runs once a month misses things. A renewal that lands the day after the sweep waits four weeks for the next one. The right cadence is the one that matches how fresh the data needs to be. For a renewal sweep, once a day is usually right. For an inventory check it might be hourly. Pick the cadence with the cost in mind.

6. Let's practice!

Set the fields, set the time zone, pick the cadence. Let's practice.

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