Docs · Automations
Say it once, not every week.
Anything Cedric does well on request can run on a schedule. The trick is proving it by hand first.
- Set a schedule in plain language, in the channel: "do this every Friday at 9".
- Prove the task by hand before you schedule it. Scheduling an unverified task means being wrong reliably.
- Good automations report by exception, so a quiet week is one line rather than a report nobody reads.
- The schedule is the standing approval for the work; risky steps inside it still stop and ask.
- Every scheduled job is visible, pausable, and cancellable from the dashboard or the channel.
The work worth scheduling
The candidates are easy to spot: the same question, asked on the same cadence, answered the same way. The Monday numbers. The Friday shipped-this-week note. The month-end reconciliation. The daily check on whether anything is stuck. The quarterly access review that everyone agrees is important and that lapsed in February.
What these have in common is that the thinking was done once, when someone decided the report should exist. Every subsequent run is execution, and execution on a cadence is the definition of something that should not need a person to remember it.
The tell that something is ready to be scheduled is that you would be annoyed to receive it late but not surprised by its contents. Surprising output means the task still needs judgment, and it is not ready.
Setting one up properly
Five steps, and the second is the one people skip.
- 01
Run it by hand until it is right
Ask for it in the channel. Correct it. Ask again. Do this until the output needs no editing, which usually takes two or three rounds.
- 02
Check it against something you already know
Run it for a period whose answer you have. A weekly report for last week can be compared to the one you sent. Disagreement now is cheap; disagreement in three months is not.
This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the one that separates an automation people trust from one people quietly stop reading.
- 03
Ask for it on a schedule, in words
"Do that every Friday at 9am and post it here." No cron syntax, no builder. It confirms what it understood before anything is created.
- 04
Decide what silence means
Tell it whether to post every time or only when something needs attention. Exception reporting is usually right for checks, and full reporting for summaries people expect.
- 05
Review it after a month
Automations decay because the business changes underneath them. A quarterly glance at what is scheduled and whether anyone still reads it is worth the ten minutes.
Setting a schedule
Plain language, confirmed before it exists.
Sam Okonkwo9:14 AM
@Cedric do that same report every Friday at 9 and post it here
CedricAPP9:15 AM
Scheduled: the weekly marketing summary (spend by channel, signups by source, cost per signup, week-over-week change) every Friday at 09:00 in your timezone, posted to this channel with the data attached. First run is Friday 14 August. You can pause or change it from here or the dashboard.
Stated back to you
It repeats what it will do, when, and where before the job exists, so a misunderstanding is caught immediately.
No syntax to learn
Cadences are described the way people describe them. Every weekday, the first of the month, every other Tuesday.
Changeable in a sentence
"Make that 8am" or "pause it until September" adjusts the job without rebuilding it.
Reporting by exception
The failure mode of scheduled reporting is volume. A daily check that produces a full report every day becomes wallpaper within a fortnight, and the one day it says something important is the day nobody reads it.
The fix is to say what you want to hear about. A daily reconciliation check that posts "37 transactions, all matched" is one line and is fine. The same check finding three mismatches should be loud, specific, and hard to skim past.
Say what quiet should look like. A check that is passing and a check that has silently stopped running look identical from the outside, so a one-line all-clear is worth having. Nothing at all is indistinguishable from broken.
Gated steps
The schedule authorises the work, not every consequence.
CedricAPP10:02 AM
Monthly reconciliation ran. 212 payouts, 209 matched. Three exceptions on the attached tab. One of them needs an action: the duplicate $99 refund should be reversed. That is not something the schedule covers, so it is waiting for approval.
Grace Adeyemi10:03 AM
Approved, reverse it.
What to schedule, and what not to
The line is whether the judgment was made once or is made each time.
| Task | Schedule it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The weekly numbers post | Yes | Same query, same shape, every week |
| A daily stuck-items check | Yes | Ideal exception report, silent when fine |
| Month-end reconciliation | Yes | Fixed cadence, fixed method, exceptions surface |
| Access and permission reviews | Yes | Important, boring, and reliably forgotten |
| Drafting a specific customer reply | No | Each one needs its own context |
| Anything you have not verified once | No | You would be automating an unknown |
| A decision with judgment in it | No | Ask for the analysis on a schedule, keep the decision |
How automations go wrong
Scheduling before verifying. The single most common mistake. A wrong report delivered punctually every Friday is worse than no report, because people act on it.
Too many, too quickly. Six new scheduled posts in a week trains your team to ignore the channel. Add one, let it earn its place, then add another.
Nobody owns it. A scheduled job with no owner outlives its usefulness by months. Put a name against each one, even informally.
Underlying changes break silently. When a tool changes or a definition shifts, output can stay plausible while becoming wrong. Cedric flags what it notices, and it cannot notice everything: the quarterly review is not optional.
FAQ
Ask for it in plain language in the channel, after running the task by hand. Cedric confirms the cadence, destination, and content before creating it.
The dashboard lists every scheduled job, what it does, when it last ran, and when it runs next. You can pause, edit, or cancel from there or from the channel.
The schedule pre-approves the work itself. Gated steps inside it, such as sending something outward or moving money, still stop and ask each time.
It reports the failure and says what it was unable to do. An expired connection is the most common cause, and it names that too.
Yes. Pause and resume in a sentence, or from the dashboard. Nothing is lost while paused.
Yes, in proportion to the work each run does. A scheduled summary is a small, predictable cost; see [pricing](/pricing) for the plans.
Ready when you are
Automate the thing you do every Friday.
Install Cedric, get one recurring task right by hand, and then say "do that every week".
$50 in free credits, no card needed.