Sending a Reminder Email from a SharePoint List

[ScottShearer]

Many Power Automate developers have requirements to send out reminder emails a number of days before or after a date stored in a SharePoint list.  For example, a list might have columns for Due Date,  POC and Status.  The requirement is to send an email to the POC one week before the due date if the item status is not complete.  The following will explain how to meet this requirement. 

Here is a screen shot of our SharePoint list:

The POC column is a Person or Group column and Status is a choice column.

I'll start my Flow with a recurrence trigger set to fire once a day.

Next, I'll use a SharePoint Get items action.  My Get items action uses a Filter query.

Here's what you need to know about the Filter Query:

• The purpose of the Filter Query is to limit the items returned to those that meet our criteria
• The SharePoint column name is the internal name.  The internal name may be different than the display name (the name you see).  Internal names never have spaces.  The best way to determine a columns internal name is to examine the output from your Get items action and see how the column name is referenced - that is the internal name.
• I use the following operators in my query:
  • "eq" for equals
  • "and" in order to combine two conditions
• SharePoint stores dates in the following format: yyyy-MM-dd
  • I need to make sure that the date to which I compare the date stored in SharePoint is formatted the same way
  • I use the addDays() expression to add 7 days from the current date and format the date
  • I use the utcNow() expression to provide the current date
• The expression that I use can be seen in the action comments
• Note the single quotes around my parameters

Finally, I loop through all of the items returned and send an email to the POC.

Here is my Flow from Top to bottom:

Please note that SharePoint stores all dates as UTC dates and you may need to account for your time zone.

For more information on using OData filters with Power Automate and SharePoint, see this blog post from Pieter Veenstra.