I’m working on creating an automation that needs to run when a record gets updated. The tricky part is that I only want this automation to execute if the target date field contains a date that falls within December.
I’ve been looking into different approaches but I’m wondering if there’s a way to accomplish this using the standard workflow tools without having to build a custom solution from scratch. Has anyone dealt with similar month-specific conditional logic before?
The workflow should check the date field value and only proceed with the actions if the month portion equals December. I’m hoping there’s a built-in way to evaluate the month component of a datetime field in the conditional logic.
Had the same issue with quarterly campaigns last year. Skip extracting the month in your workflow - instead, create a checkbox field that gets updated by a separate process rule. The rule triggers when your date field changes and checks the checkbox if DATEVALUE(date_field) >= DATE(YEAR(date_field), 12, 1) AND DATEVALUE(date_field) < DATE(YEAR(date_field)+1, 1, 1). Your main automation just looks at whether the checkbox is checked. Way simpler workflow conditions, plus you can reuse this checkbox for reports or other stuff. Performance was much better too - the rule only fires when dates actually change, not on every single record update.
I’ve built something similar for year-end reporting. Use a formula field to extract the month from your date field.
Create a formula: MONTH(your_date_field) = 12. This returns true for December dates. Use this formula field as your trigger instead of evaluating the date directly in the workflow.
Alternatively, try TEXT(your_date_field, “MM”) = “12” if your platform supports it.
I prefer MONTH() - it’s cleaner and doesn’t rely on date formatting. If someone changes the date format later, your automation won’t break.
Put the date logic in a separate calculated field instead of stuffing it all into the workflow condition. Way easier to debug when things break.