Scheduled workflows

Create a scheduled workflow

1. Create an automation and choose On a schedule.
2. Select a preset or enter a five-field cron expression.
3. Add actions that can run without a contact.
4. Save and publish the workflow.

Five-field cron syntax

┌ minute        0-59
│ ┌ hour       0-23
│ │ ┌ day      1-31
│ │ │ ┌ month  1-12 or jan-dec
│ │ │ │ ┌ day of week  0-7 or sun-sat
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *

Use * for every value, commas for a list, a hyphen for a range, and a slash for a step. Both 0 and 7 mean Sunday. When both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, a match on either one is enough to run.

Schedule examples

Scheduled runs have no contact

Each due schedule creates one run for the workflow, not one run per CRM contact. Contact actions such as send email, send SMS, add tag, update contact, create opportunity, move stage, and assign user therefore skip. Create task and call a webhook can run without a contact; their contact fields will be empty or null.

To run work for individual contacts, start with a contact event and use a Wait step, or arrange for an external service to call an API that creates the relevant Systemly event.

How scheduled runs are delivered

The background maintenance sweep checks active, published schedules. It remembers the most recent run and looks back for a due minute, so a slightly late sweep does not silently lose the firing. The lookback is capped at roughly 25 hours; a longer outage can miss old schedule occurrences.