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Hi everyone, and welcome to this SwiftFox Masterclass. Today we're looking at relative dates in automations. SwiftFox has supported this across the platform for a while, especially in finance related filters like filtering a receipt view from start of the month or setting a report window from start of the year minus six months.

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In a filter a relative date saves you from resetting a view, in an automation it saves you from a date being wrong.

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An automation runs over and over for different people at different moments. Any fixed date you right into it was correct exactly once – on the day you built it – and has been aging ever since.

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A relative date instead tells the automation to work out the value at the moment it runs, so it comes out right for every contact, every time.

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Anywhere that canvas asks for a date, type the @ symbol and a short list appears, such as @today, @startOfDay, @startOfWeek and @startOfMonth.

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Those are shortcuts rather than limits. The offset is yours to set. So @today(+7d), @today(+30d) or @today(-14d) all behave exactly as you'd expect.

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There are two places that matter most. Update custom fields were the value for any date. Custom fields can be relative and create a task in the due date field.

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The clearest case is finance. Say a member’s status custom field moves from financial to unfinancial. An automation watching that field can stamp an unfinished date of today, the moment it happens. From then on, you can track, filter and report on when each member went to unfinancial. Which is something the status on its own can never tell you, because status only records where someone is now, not when they got there.

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A form arrives, a task is created due to day plus seven days, and the response window runs from submission rather than from whenever somebody picks it up. Because these values land in real custom fields, they're filterable.

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A date written by an automation can drive a list, a segment, or an action centre view. So the automation sets the date and the rest of SwiftFox acts on it.

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Relative dates turn a date you have to maintain into a date that maintains itself. A good place to start is one of the fields that your team is currently handling by hand. You can let an automation write it instead. Thanks for joining this week's masterclass and we'll catch you in the next one.