Due Date Approaching Not Triggering: Workaround?

English Forum Tips and Tricks
, , ,
1

I’ve spent about all the time I can reading other forum posts about due dates and rules. I’m designing a process to move completed tasks from a project to an archive project after 30 days. Helpful context: these are automation tasks triggering emails in Power Automate and I can play with start / end dates or custom fields if needed without bothering anyone else’s work. They autocomplete when they arrive to board A to trigger Power Automate. I want to shift them to a centralized archive board after 30 days because Power Automate has a limitation we hit once board A has 1,000+ tasks. I first looked for a trigger of 30 days past due date (doesn’t exist). I assume a task is only considered “overdue” if not completed, so I couldn’t turn to that trigger either.

Attempt 1: Start dates appear to be able to trigger rules at x days after start date, so I set things up first with a rule to set start dates/due dates of today when the task arrives to board A and another rule to move task to board B when the start date is 30 days ago. Let things sit for a few days and nothing happened. I wondered if it was because adding a start date and due date of the same date might automatically change to only a due date. Thought about it some more and changed to…

Attempt 2: Adapted rules to set due date 30 days out when the task arrives to board A and to move the task to board B with the due date approaching trigger and due date is today. Nothing is firing after a couple of days with tasks that qualify for this rule. There are tasks sitting there with due dates of two days ago and yesterday, as well as today.

Does due date approaching only work for incomplete tasks? What am I missing? Is there some other way I can have a flow move things to another board after 30 days?

2

@Elizabeth_Lumsden Although I haven’t played around with due dates as triggers, it would make sense that they would not trigger if the task is completed. An alternative to moving after 30 days may be to move when the status changes to complete - unless there is a specific reason for tasks to stay on Board A for 30 days.

3

Hi @Elizabeth_Lumsden, I didn’t have time to test this, but what if in the same rule used to autocomplete, it changes a single-select custom field “PA” to “Complete” . Then you could add another rule that says when that custom field is changed to “Complete” it can remark the task as incomplete and change the start date to 30 days after the rule is triggered. This will ensure the rules run in order and would allow your start date rule to properly trigger on the incomplete task.

4

I changed the trigger in Power Automate to be when a task is created instead of when a task is completed. I now have the due date being set at one day later when a task arrives to the board and then they move at midnight to the centralized Archive board and get completed and categorized at that point. Occasionally we have to trouble-shoot an email confirmation that failed and I wanted a team member to have an easy way to trigger a resend on things in the past 30 days. I now have a manually triggered rule in the centralized archive board that can trigger a resend in the correct Power Automate-integrated board when needed. The workaround is working and is now my new flow instead of a workaround!