Triggers and schedules

Every workflow has one way to start, and it's the first thing in the workflow. Choose it by asking what the automation is for:

App triggersCopy Anchor Link

An app trigger starts a run each time an event happens in a connected app: a new payment in Stripe, a new message in a Slack channel, a new email in Gmail, a new response to a form. The run receives the event, and later steps read its fields.

1. S

   New Stripe payment

   Stripe · status: succeeded

   Trigger
2. GS

   Append row

   Google Sheets · @payment.amount

Most triggers take filters that narrow which events start a run. New Stripe payment can be limited to one payment status; New Slack message watches the channel you pick and can be limited to one person or a keyword.

What a trigger hands to the runCopy Anchor Link

Each trigger delivers a fixed set of fields. New Stripe payment, for example, delivers the payment's amount, currency, status, customer, description and when it was created. A step can only use what the event carries: the Gmail trigger delivers an email's sender, recipients, subject, date and body, but not its attachments. To work with those, add Gmail's Download attachments step.

Each app's page lists its triggers, with their filters and the fields each one delivers. These apps have triggers:

• Airparser
• Airtable
• Box
• Calendly
• Canva
• ClickUp
• Coda
• Discord
• Dropbox
• Eventbrite
• Fillout
• GitHub
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Drive
• Google Sheets
• Linear
• Mercury
• Microsoft Outlook
• Notion
• PayPal
• QuickBooks Online
• Rackspace Email
• Rackspace Email Admin
• Slack
• Stripe
• Telegram
• Todoist
• Trello
• Twitch
• X (Twitter)
• Zoom

For any other app, a schedule can check for new records instead.

SchedulesCopy Anchor Link

A schedule starts a run at the times you choose. There are three kinds:

• Every few minutes, hours or days, such as every 15 minutes. The shortest interval is one minute.
• At a time of day, on the days you choose: every day at 8:00, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 17:30, or on the first of each month.
• Once, at a date and time you set.

Times follow the workflow owner's time zone unless you choose another one.

Choosing between a trigger and a scheduleCopy Anchor Link

If the goal is "when something happens", use the app's trigger. A schedule that checks for new records every hour does the same work up to an hour late, and has to work out which records it already handled.

Use a schedule when the goal really is about time, like a weekly digest or a daily check, and keep two things in mind:

• Look back exactly one interval. A daily run that reports on "yesterday" sees every day once. A run that only happens on weekdays never sees Saturday or Sunday, so look back to the last working day, or run every day.
• Don't overlap windows. A daily run asking for "everything changed since yesterday" can see the same record on two days. End each window where the next run's begins.

On demandCopy Anchor Link

A workflow with no trigger and no schedule runs only when something starts it:

• you, from the workflow in Lodol
• your code, through the developer API
• another workflow, with a Run a workflow step
• an AI agent, which can use the workflow as one of its tools

On-demand workflows can declare inputs, such as which client to report on, so one workflow can be run for any of them. A workflow with a trigger or a schedule takes no inputs: everything it needs comes from the event or from its steps.

Turning a workflow onCopy Anchor Link

A workflow with a trigger or a schedule runs only while it's turned on. Once it's on, each event, or each scheduled time, starts one run, until you turn it off or delete it. A workflow waiting for its trigger doesn't use any of your plan's runs.

Saving a change to a workflow that's on pauses it until you turn it back on.

NextCopy Anchor Link