“Stop thinking about dates, let Power Automate reminder flows send you notifications when needed!”
Automating the repetitive work might be the main reason for using Power Automate, but it’s surely not the only one. It’s also about making your internal processes more reliable, to make sure that nothing is lost, nothing is stuck. Everyone should know that there’s some work to do, and Power Automate flows can be the ones to tell them.
How do you build Power Automate reminder flows? What questions should you ask and answer when building one?
When will it send the reminder?
The first action in every flow is the trigger. Since reminders should be sent on a regular basis, here we’re talking about the recurrence trigger. But how often will you trigger the flow?
Will it run every day or only during working days? Should it trigger only on a very specific day in a month, e.g. the first working day, first selected day in a month, Nth day in a month, or last working day? Some of these can be configured directly in the trigger, something might need more or less complex trigger conditions.
What will be in the reminder?
The next question is what should be included in the reminder. You can build a reminder on every data source containing a date – SharePoint lists / libraries, Excel files, Planner tasks, Dataverse tables, etc. As long as there’s some date to use in the filters, it’s only about deciding when to send it related to the date.
Is it a day before the date? A month? Or some days after the date? Use filtering to get only the relevant entries.
Just be aware whether the column is date only or includes time as well – you can’t use the ‘eq’ operator on columns with time. In such situations you must always work with a date range.
Also, if you’re not skipping reminders during weekends, you must reflect that in the filter to send them on Monday.
What will the reminder email look like?
Getting the relevant items / rows is one thing, but how do you present them to the users? Will it be just some email with a link? What link will it be? To a task, item, file, maybe some pre-filtered SharePoint view?
Following up on the question – how many emails will the users receive? You surely don’t want to send one email for each row when you could send just one email per user with multiple items. An email containing HTML table with links to all the items, with a bit of formatting to make it easier to read for the users, including data from multiple selection columns. You can even add some additional formatting to make the tables look nicer – add some table formatting, maybe even conditional colours to the text or on the background.
Who will receive those reminders?
The last question is who should receive those reminders. Is it always the same user defined in some configuration? Is it specific user for each of the rows? Or is it both, one reminder to the user and after some time escalation to somebody else?
Summary
Asking the four questions above and reflecting the responses in the flow will allow you to build solid Power Automate reminder flows. Think about how often you’ll send those reminders, what are the rules for items to be included in them, how will you present the data to the users, and who’re those users who’ll get them. A few steps to keep your processes running, to stop thinking about the dates by delegating them to a flow.
It’s also something you don’t have to build over and over again – a great example for a process template you could share with other users for their reminders. After all, one such flow is included also in the Approval process solution.