Daily HubSpot Workflow Magic: Date Automation Without Operations Hub

HubSpot's workflow automation is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to get creative to achieve your goals, especially if you're not ready to invest in Operations Hub. Recently, a HubSpot Community member sought a solution for triggering a workflow daily to update a date property and create tasks. Let’s dive into the problem and explore the suggested solutions.

The Challenge: Daily Workflow Triggers

The original poster wanted to set a date property to "today" every day. This was part of a larger strategy to manage data synced with Airtable, identifying active vs. inactive contacts after merges or deletions. Additionally, they aimed to automate daily task creation for deal management.

Without Operations Hub, the standard workflow options seemed limited. The initial approach involved a workflow with re-enrollment enabled and triggers based on the "Heartbeat" property (checking if it was "today," "unknown," or in the past). However, the workflow only executed once.

Solutions and Workarounds

One respondent suggested questioning the need for a "today's date" property, highlighting that there might be better solutions, such as using "Time since" calculation properties. This is a great point – always consider if your goal can be achieved with existing features before creating complex workarounds.

The respondent then shared a link to a community post detailing an approach to creating a "today's date" property using workflows. This involved a more intricate setup to ensure the date is updated daily.

Detailed Use Cases

The original poster elaborated on their use cases:

• Airtable Sync: Identifying up-to-date contacts vs. inactive/merged contacts in Airtable by checking if a contact has a property with "today's" date that's older than one day.
• Daily Task Creation: Automating the creation of tasks for deals needing attention, streamlining the process of working through a task pipeline.

Key Takeaways and Implementation

The community discussion highlights that achieving daily workflow triggers without Operations Hub requires some ingenuity. Here's a breakdown of the possible steps:

1. Evaluate the Need: Before implementing a complex solution, determine if simpler HubSpot features like calculated properties can achieve the desired outcome.
2. "Today's Date" Property: If a "today's date" property is essential, explore the linked community post for a detailed workflow setup. This likely involves creating a custom date property and using a workflow to update it regularly.
3. Re-enrollment and Triggers: Carefully configure workflow triggers and re-enrollment settings to ensure the workflow runs daily. Consider using a combination of date-based triggers and property updates.
4. Task Automation: For daily task creation, explore using workflows to automatically create tasks based on deal properties and dates. Ensure tasks are cleared or completed after a set period.

ESHOPMAN Team Comment

This HubSpot Community thread showcases the power of creative problem-solving within the platform. While Operations Hub offers streamlined solutions for date-based automation, these workarounds demonstrate that much can be achieved with standard HubSpot tools. The key is to carefully analyze your needs and leverage the flexibility of HubSpot's workflow engine. For e-commerce businesses, automating these processes can significantly improve CRM data accuracy and sales efficiency.