Flow to send email to employee if their anniversary is approaching

[convertusRyan]

I have a human resources excel file that contains a table of a list employees that contains a column with their start date.  I would like to create a flow that will look at this file in my OneDrive, and if the anniversary of an employee's start date is within 3 months of the current date, then an email is sent to that employee.

I have googled my brains out to no end.  Help me, Power Automate Kenobi's.  You're my only hope.

Thank you for your time and assistance in advance.

convertusRyan

[wskinnermctc]

How many rows are in your excel table?

And you're basically saying you want to send an email to someone 3 months before an employee's anniversary date based on their start date.

The reason I'm asking like this is because the only way I can see this working is that the flow runs every day and checks. Even on weekends or holidays. 

It would need to send email on an exact day match based on the current date. 

There wouldn't be a way to figure an in-between range type check because the employee would get an email each time the flow ran.

[convertusRyan]

Approximately 75 rows.  

I understand.  So there isn't a way to, once the email is sent to the employee, disregard that employee the next time the process is ran.  Correct?

[wskinnermctc · Accepted solution]

No there isn't a way to track who an email was sent to without going back into the excel document and writing to a column that an action was taken. For example after an email was sent then the flow could go Update a Row in Excel table with a column "AnniversaryEmail" like the time the email was sent. However, then you are trying to manage what to do with that value now.

It's not a big issue for a flow to run everyday, but I just wanted to confirm that my example only works on exact days and the flow has to be scheduled to run everyday. (Even though my example is a push button trigger I do that for testing.)

In my example below the key is getting the current date, adding 3 months to the current date, then formatting that future date as (MM dd). Then you go through each row of the excel list and convert the Anniversary Date to the format (MM dd). After that you compare the formatted Anniversary date to the formatted future date. If they match send an email. If they don't match then do nothing.

I have an excel sheet that has birthdates for employees. I went in and changed one of the birth dates to be 5/1/2003 and the flow worked correctly since 3 months from today's date 01Feb2023 is 01May2023. It went to the No condition for the rest of the employees.

Flow Overview

Below are zoomed in shots of each step in the example flow:

Getting Current and Future 3 Month DateGetting Excel List Rows in DateTime ISO8601Format Anniversary Date and Compare to Formatted Future DateSend Email if Date matches

Let me know if this works for you,

[selfy100]

@wskinnermctc I was just about to post my successful test which was functionally exactly the same as this. It works.

[wskinnermctc]

Great! Glad it works. You could modify it with delay right before the email step if you want the delay it until the next work day or something if you don’t want it sending on the weekend. But at least the basic day part is set up.

Can you mark this as solved where I put all the steps so others can see it?

[convertusRyan]

Wow!  Amazing!  Thank you so much for this.  I am going to create my flow right away based on this.  It takes a village...

[convertusRyan]

@wskinnermctc  @selfy100 Thank you both.  I couldn't be any more grateful.  If I get this working, you will have made my HR Director extremely happy...and she is responsible for my next pay increase.  LOL  SUPER KUDOS to you both!

[selfy100]

I hope you get that increase! 

Don't forget to mark wskinnermtc's flow as a solution if you get it working so other automators can solve similar problems.

[convertusRyan]

Two quick questions;

1) Where did you find the 'Don't Send Email' operation for the IF NO condition.

and

2) How can I get the flow to send the email automatically to the employee with the coming anniversary?

Thanks again.

[selfy100]

1) "Don't send email" is just a compose. You can leave the "If No" section of the condition empty.

2) You will need to get the employee's email from the excel source. If your excel sheet doesn't have employee emails you'll have to add them.

[convertusRyan]

Hello @wskinnermctc .  I have received a sample of the table and fields for the flow in question and I am now receiving an error that I was wondering if you could help me with.  Here are a couple of screenshots.

Since 'Ryan test 1' is exactly three months away, it should trigger the email. Your thoughts?  Thank you in advance!

And what is the 'value' in the first 'Apply to each' supposed to be?

Sample of table

[selfy100]

Can you post a screenshot of your flow? There shouldn't be nested Apply to Each functions.

[wskinnermctc]

Hi @convertusRyan if you are following the example flow then there should only be 1 apply to each step in the entire flow. That Apply to Each is saying "In this Apply to Each container I want to do these things for each individual row that was returned in the List Rows step" in basic terms.

So whatever you do within the Apply to Each is doing it for the individual row. You wouldn't need to Apply to Each again for making changes to the date value specifically.

Apply to Each

[wskinnermctc]

Thanks @selfy100 I just played around with it and I think they tried to put a Date value directly into the Apply to Each step instead of letting it pop up automatically from another step.

If you manually make an Apply to Each and then put a Get Items value (I used Birth Date) into the Output of the Apply to Each then it will automatically create another Apply to Each on top of that one which uses body/value

Do not double apply to each

Error with incorrect double apply to each

In my example I manually created the "Apply to Each 2" and then put Birth Date into the Select an output from previous steps. Power Automate automatically created the "Apply to Each 3" that used outputs('List_rows_present_in_a_table')?['body/value'] in the Select an output from previous steps. The automatically created "Apply to Each 3" wraps around my manually created "Apply to Each 2".

I got the same error message when trying to run it.

[convertusRyan]

Here is my current flow along with the error I am now getting.  It also sends me two emails although I should only be receiving one.  The 'Last Hire' column is the employee start date.

Flow 1 of 2Flow 2 of 2Current error

[wskinnermctc]

Hi @convertusRyan it is because your date format coming from excel is not being processed correctly in Power Automate. There are ways to convert or reformat dates within power automate.

However,

That date format you have in excel is not great.

I can't tell if the person was last hired "3-Jan-23" is supposed to be January 3, 2023 or January 23, 2003.

Instead of spending time formatting the dates in power automate. You should ask if you can get the dates in excel in a better format. More specifically you want it in a number format either dd/MM/yyyy or MM/dd/yyyy.

Also your date column in excel might even be Text instead of a date field. So that could be causing problems.

Can you tell me if you can get a different format date excel file?

If you can't get a different excel file format date, tell me 2 things:

1- What is the column type in excel for your Last Hire date? It would show at the top of excel either Text, Date, Custom

2- What is the format of the date for Last Hire? d-MMM-yy or is it y-MMM-dd   

[convertusRyan]

Hi @wskinnermctc .  The Last Hire column is now in dd-MM-yyyy as shown. 

1- It shows 'Date'

2- It was originally formatted to '14-Mar-12'.  The last 'Type' in the Date category of the Format Cells window.

[wskinnermctc]

I just tested it and the only time I got the error is when it hit rows with blank dates. 

Note: I did have an odd thing happening where it was saying every value in the condition was true. I added compose statements to look at the values and reran the flow and they were obviously not equal.

I deleted all of my values out of boxes, recreated the List Rows step, and reapplied all the values and the flow worked perfectly. I don't have a clue why it was doing that, but somehow I had got something crossed or the flow had a ghost inside of it. Maybe try clearing out the flow or remaking it.

(I've remade a lot of flows because something gets bugged and can't be reset. So that is not uncommon.)

[convertusRyan]

Curious.  Ok, I will start the flow over from scratch and hope for the best.  When I do so, I will only create a table with my two entries and worry about the rest once I get it functioning properly.  Thank you again.  You may be hearing from me again.  I am new to power automate and it is fascinating to work with, but a bit of a headache of a learning curve.

Thanks again.