How to Schedule a Flow to Run Automatically

Most flows start when someone clicks Start on a published flow. A Schedule trigger lets a flow start itself on a recurring basis instead — daily, weekly, or monthly — with no one needing to click anything. This is useful for recurring processes like daily shift handover reports, weekly team standups, or monthly compliance checklists.

Schedule triggers are a Pro plan feature.

Adding a Schedule trigger to a flow

1. Open the flow in the builder (Flows → [your flow] → Edit)
2. In the left-hand toolbar, click Schedule (violet clock icon) instead of Manual Trigger
3. A flow can have only one of these two trigger types, not both. If you need both a manual and a scheduled version of the same process, duplicate the flow.

Setting the recurrence

Click the Schedule node to open its configuration panel.

Simple mode — pick a frequency and Aitomic Flow builds the schedule for you:

• Daily — runs every day at a chosen time
• Weekly — runs on a specific day of the week, or every weekday (Monday to Friday)
• Monthly — runs on a specific day of the month

Advanced mode — enter a raw cron expression directly for anything Simple mode does not cover (e.g. every 15 minutes).

You also set:

• Timezone — the schedule fires based on this timezone, not the server's
• Ends on (optional) — the flow stops firing automatically after this date. Leave it blank to run indefinitely until you pause or delete it.

The panel shows a live preview of the next time the flow will run.

Who can be assigned the first step

Because a scheduled run has no human triggering it, the step right after the Schedule node cannot use an assignee rule that depends on "the requester" — there is not one. You must use one of:

• Fixed person
• Specific department head
• Role in department

If you try to publish with Requester, Requestor's manager, Skip-level manager, or Requester's department head, Aitomic Flow blocks the publish and explains why. Required form fields on this step are fine — the assignee fills them in from My Tasks, the same as any other step.

See All Assignee Rule Types Explained for details on each rule.

What happens when it fires

At the scheduled time, Aitomic Flow creates a new flow instance automatically. The assigned person is notified in-app, by email, and (if configured) via Slack or Teams — the same way they would be for a manually triggered flow. The instance shows up in Instances and the audit trail like any other run, labeled as started by a "Scheduled trigger."

When a scheduled run gets skipped

A scheduled run is skipped instead of fired in two situations:

• The previous run is still open. Aitomic Flow will not start a second instance of the same flow while an earlier one has not reached Complete or been cancelled. It waits for the next scheduled time instead.
• The assignee cannot be resolved — for example, a Fixed person rule points to an email that is no longer an active user.

Either way, every admin in the workspace gets a notification explaining what happened, with a link back to the flow so it can be fixed.

Pro plan requirement and limits

Schedule triggers require a Pro plan. On the Free plan, the Schedule option in the builder shows a "PRO" badge — clicking it explains the upgrade instead of adding the node. Pro workspaces can have a limited number of active scheduled flows at once (shown as a usage count on the management page below); Enterprise has no limit.

If a workspace's subscription lapses and it moves back to the Free plan, every scheduled flow is automatically paused so it cannot keep running without being billed for it. Re-upgrading to Pro does not automatically resume them — an admin must resume each one explicitly.

Managing scheduled flows

Admins can see every scheduled flow for the workspace at Scheduled Flows in the sidebar (/admin/scheduled-flows): the schedule in plain language, timezone, end date, last and next run, status, and how many times it has run in the last 30 days.

From there you can:

• Pause / Resume a flow's schedule without unpublishing it
• Run now — fire an instance immediately, useful for testing. This creates a real instance and sends a real notification to the assignee, so use it deliberately.

See also

• All Assignee Rule Types Explained
• How to Configure Assignee Rules
• How to create a workflow
• How to Check Your Plan and Usage