Deadlines and reminders

As a workflow lead you can set deadlines for steps, and send assignees (internal and external) reminders to get the step completed in time.


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Not what you've been looking for?

Tip:To see how to let users set their own deadlines, see Allow users to set instance deadlines.

Need to know how to send internal reminders? See Schedule a step start and deadline

Set up a deadline and reminders

  1. Click on a workflow you want to update.
  2. Click ... > Edit workflow.
  3. If you don't have this already, create a form (+ Add step > Form) and add an Email address input form field. Assign this step to an external user.

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Note: This is the step in which the external user will provide their email address. You can select this data reference to send a reminder.

  1. Click on the step for which you want to create a reminder.
  2. Under the step name, click Add deadline.
  1. Use the dropdowns to set the deadline for the step.
  2. Click Add reminder.
  3. Select the participants you want to send the reminders to. To send the email to the email address the external user provided in a previous step, assign the step to an external user, and in the deadline pop-up, select the Email address input data reference.

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For the data reference to work, the email address needs to be provided in previous step of the workflow.

  1. Specify how long the reminder should be sent to the assignee before the deadline.
  2. Click Save.

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Tip: To set up a reminder to be sent before and past the deadline, set up two reminders with different date parameters (step 8).

Now the assignee will receive a reminder at the time you specified. The email might look like the following:


For internal users, step deadline information is also displayed on your Next Matter dashboard.

If a step is overdue, you Next Matter users can see it in the Attention needed tab of their Inbox.

Deadlines and conditons

If you create a step deadline (for example 1 day after the completion time of a previous form step) and also set a condition to skip the step if the form is empty, we'll evaluate the condition first. If the previous step completes with an empty form, the step with the set condition will be skipped immediately and will not send a deadline reminder.