Run a Power Automate flow on a schedule

  • 9 minutes

In this unit, we will explore how you can build scheduled flows. We'll use a trigger called recurrence. A scheduled flow is a flow that performs one or more tasks in a specified time interval. As an example, we'll build a flow for your HR team that automatically pulls once a day all accepted candidates from a Microsoft Excel workbook on OneDrive to the employee table in Business Central.

Create a recurring flow

Watch the following demonstration on how to create a recurring flow in Power Automate.

Specify advanced options

If we open the previous flow in Edit mode, expand the trigger and then select Show advanced options, we can schedule when the flow should run. Here are a few things that you can do.

  • You can select a Time zone to specify whether the Start time reflects a local time zone, Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), or something else.

  • You can specify a Start time using this format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ

  • You can select a Frequency with one of the following configurations:

    1. If you specified Day as the Frequency, specify the time of day when the flow should run.

    2. If you specified Week as the Frequency, specify the day or days of the week on which the flow should run and the time or times of day when the flow should run.

    3. For all other Frequency options, you won't have additional settings.

For example, configure the options as shown in the screenshot below to start a flow no sooner than noon (Pacific time) on Monday, July 1, 2020, and run it every week on Tuesdays at 5:30 PM (Pacific time).

Specify advanced options for a scheduled flow

You can save the flow by selecting the Save command.