Flow to Check SharePoint List Status Column Twice a Day

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Phineas

5,325 Super User 2025 Season 2

I have SharePoint list.

The SharePoint list has a 'Status' column.

The 'Status' column has half-a-dozen options.

I have been tasked with creating a flow that checks the list 'Status' column
twice a day (not when an item is created or modified - but twice a day), to
see if the 'Status' of any of the items has changed.

If yes, send out a specific email unique to that 'Status' change. I think I've
got the email part down.

My question, what is the best practice for setting up the twice a day, and
checking the entire list to determine if the 'Status' has changed for any or all?

Is this possible? How would flow know what the 'Status' was 12 hours ago for
every item? How would flow know the modification to a item was the 'Status'
column and not some other meta data?

Categories:

Building flows

I have the same question (0)

All responses (6)

Answers (0)

Suggested answer

Ali5 10 on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi,

You need to use this action to check if a field has changed in a given time period.

Asad

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

Like (0)

Report

Setting the flow to run twice a day is easy using a recurrence trigger. The problem, as you have identified it, is that the flow has no way to know what the previous status was. You would need to add a column to the list and have the flow store the current status in it when it runs. You can then check to see if the status is different from that column. If it is then the status has changed, if not then the status hasn't changed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this Post helped you, please click "Does this answer your question" and give it a like to help others in the community find the answer too!

Paul Papanek Stork, MVP
Blog: https://www.dontpapanic.com/blog

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

David_MA 12,980 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report
What you want to do is definitely possible, but before you do it, how big is your list? If it is a large list with 1,000s of items, I would not recommend this. If your list is kept small or you have a status that you can use to exclude things that have been completed so when you get the items, you're only returning a couple hundred items or so, the flow should perform well.

If you can do what I outline above, then I would do this:

Create a scheduled flow and schedule it to run at the two times of day that you want it to run.

Use a get items action with the filter if needed as explained above.

In an apply to each action, use the get changes for an item or a file action. This will provide a true/false value on all the fields in the list telling if they were modified.

Configuring it may be tricky as I only use this for checking if a field has been modified from the trigger and thus use the trigger start and trigger end values.

However, the action does show that you can specify an ISO8601 date for the since and until values.

You would then add a condition to see if the field has changed is true.

If so, send the e-mail on the yes side of the condition.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Phineas 5,325 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report

@Ali5

What should be in the 'Since' and 'Until' if the intent is to check the status every 12 hours.

I've got my recurrence trigger set to the following.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Phineas 5,325 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report

I can't get my flow to kick out the required email based on the data.

I the 'Status' equals 'Pending' and the 'Lead Date' equals today (2/5/2025)
an email should go out.

The email portion works but the Condition does see the data as qualifying.

What am I missing?

SharePoint List. The second line should be true in the flow Condition, as the Status is 'Pending' and the date is 2/5/2025, but the
return is 'false'.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
David_MA 12,980 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

Like (0)

Report
I would get rid of the condition and add a filter query to the get items action. This is more efficient and will only return the items needed. You can set up a filter query like this:

Just change Created to the date field in your list, which looks like lead date from your screen shot. Just note that the filter query uses the internal name of the field and not the display name. You can get the internal name by going to the settings in your list and opening the field. At the end of the URL will be the internal name. To get items where the lead date is today, you would use this expression replacing Created with your lead date internal name:

Created ge '@{startOfDay(utcNow())}' and Created lt '@{addDays(startOfDay(utcNow()),1)}'

You can add the status to the filter as well:

Created ge '@{startOfDay(utcNow())}' and Created lt '@{addDays(startOfDay(utcNow()),1)}' and Status eq 'Pending'

Note: your convert time zone action is either returning the wrong value or not doing anything. This is because:

SharePoint stores all dates and times in UTC time.

And you have both the source and destination time zone set to the same time zone.

Then this would not work in your condition because you chose the output format of MM/dd/yyyy. Filter queries and conditions in Power Automate require the ISO8601 date format of yyyy-MM-dd to work.

Based on your screen shot, your compose action to convert Eastern time is also not using the ISO8601 date format.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No