Galvin’s Favorite Flows: Pausing Automated Processes on Weekends and Holidays

Daily transaction batch reports. Task alerts. B2B marketing emails. You have Salesforce Flows automating processes and doing repetitive tasks. You know a tenet of good user experience is, “If the user can only do one thing, do it for them.” Automation rock star status achieved. 

But then Monday comes. Staff are bogged down with an inbox full of unnecessary tasks from the weekend when no one was working. Then a prospective customer receives an automated email on Christmas, blowing the cover of the “personalized” communication your company has been sending. You’ve quickly gone from rock star to roadie. Good news—one of Galvin’s Favorite Flows helps reset the stage by pausing automations on weekends and holidays.

Flows automate business processes by collecting, updating, and creating information. They then act on that information to execute a task or make the data available to specific users or systems. Flows are great for repetitive, time-consuming work. They can execute complex logic, work with the Salesforce database, and provide users with guided actions to boost productivity. 

Let’s say a Flow sends an automated email to customers on a cadence. The first after-purchase email happens at the seven-day mark. Another email goes out in 15 days. Then the customer receives an email every 30 days after that. This is great for busy account executives or customer service representatives. Instead of remembering the right time to send the email, the system does it for them. 

Just like an assembly line, Flows run until told to stop. In the previous example, the system just calculates the number of days and sends the corresponding email. But perhaps not all days are created equal. If a task does not apply to weekends or holidays, the Flow needs additional logic to take a day off just like everyone else. That’s where this Galvin Favorite Flow takes center stage. 

We first add data fields that allow the system to recognize day of week and applicable holidays. The Flow then looks at the trigger date for executing the task and verifies if it is a holiday or weekend. If the variable is true (Monday through Friday), the Flow runs normally. For when the verification returns false, we add a pause condition. 

A custom formula calculates time based on the information collected from the day of week and holiday data fields. Depending on what the system finds, the pause condition waits for 48 hours from Saturdays and 24 hours from Sundays and holidays. Once the time lapses, the Flow resumes. 

Now if you’re asking what happens when holidays fall on weekends, the Flow is smart enough to catch that. 

Flows run only when defined conditions are met. When the Flow resumes, it knows the 24 hours past the holiday have expired. When it checks again before executing the task, it must find a weekday for the condition to be true. If the 24-hour expiration ends on a Sunday, the conditions will return false and the Flow pauses until Monday. Now if the conditions return true, the Flow gets back to work and the email is off to the client. 

With some additional logic and data, Flows can take on countless automated tasks without creating any additional work. Now that’s a true rock star. 

For more ways Galvin helps clients “go with the Flow,” check out our other Favorite Flows or reach out with a process you need simplified. 

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