Good afternoon.
I’m working on a board that stores three deadlines based on Date1, which is the date we receive permission to start a project.
Date2, which is 2 weeks later, absolutely has to be a Date column because there’s an automation that triggers if it isn’t met.
Date3 occurs 6 weeks after Date2 and is our completion deadline.
Date4 occurs 2 weeks after Date3 and is our delivery deadline.
Date3 and Date4 can be formula columns, but I’d love to be able to trigger them via an automation. “When Date1 changes, change Date2 to Date1 + X days”
The closest prebuilt option is the one with the Numbers column in it, but I reeeeally don’t want to have multiple numbers columns, especially since it’s the same for every. single. job. and we have several hundred lines on this board alone, more added every day.
I’ve applied for inclusion in the custom automations beta, but haven’t heard back from support yet.
Hello @MelissaH,
In a similar scenario I have used the automation “When status changes to something push due date by some days”. You can create a column with a field “Update dates” and link all the dates to this status. When Date1 changes you have to change the new column to “Update dates” and all the dates will be pushed the required days with respect to day 1.
Hope it helps.
Pedro’s solution looks fine to me, but it requires an additional status column to trigger the automation.
Another idea is to use Integromat for this. Use a webhook that triggers when any value (column) of the item (row) changes. In Integromat, start with a webhook and only continue (filter) is the ‘Date1’ column changes (you get new and old value in the trigger). Next step is to get the item, use Integromat functions like add days or add months and update the Date2 etc columns.
The downside is that you probably start using column numbers, and these will change if you insert columns. So, be sure that the board layout will not change or adapt the Integromat scenario if it does.
I wound up using Integromat; thank you for the suggestion! First iteration updated every pulse in the board and ate up about 75% of my (test account) operations for the month - time to push for a buy-in, looks like.
I experienced the same rapid decline of my free 1.000 Integromat ops. Hence I upgraded it
That is also the reason to filter out changed columns as early as possible. So, if you are interested to act only when Date1 changes, you can filter that in the flow directly after the webhook.
