In AgencyZoom, there are certain settings involving Business Days that can change how and when Automations Trigger. Most of these settings can be found in MyAgency (the gear in the bottom left) > System Settings.
Most of the Business Day related settings will be in the “Automation” and “Work Schedule” tabs of System Settings.
What Determines a Business Day?
What days are considered Business Days are determined by the “Work Schedule” tab of your System Settings. By default, Saturday and Sunday are not counted as business days, but if you’d like, you can manually switch them to be counted as business days. You can’t set other days of the week to not be counted as business days, only Saturday and Sunday.
The primary purpose of that setting, is how it works in relation to another setting in the Automation tab of System Settings, the setting: “Execute automation steps on business days only?”
This setting will prevent automated steps from triggering on the days you’ve marked as not business days”. Any automation that would trigger on a non-Business Day will instead trigger on the next Business Day. So, for instance, if I had an automation set to trigger on Saturday, it would instead trigger on Monday. However, if you’d like to prevent automation from ever being scheduled on Business Days, you can use the next feature- the Business Days/Calendar Days switch.
Business Days vs Calendar Days
This setting determines whether you’d like the number of days before an automated step triggers- to be based on Business Days, or Calendar Days.
I’ll demonstrate with an example. Let’s say you have an automation set up that triggers 8 days after it enters a specific stage in a pipeline. And then, you drop a lead into that Pipeline on August 11th.
If your settings are such that automation triggers based on Business Days, this automation won’t count Saturday and Sunday and therefore will trigger on August 20th.
But if your settings are such that automation triggers based on calendar days, it would count Saturday and Sunday in the day count and would instead trigger on August 18th.
Our recommendation is that it’s best to use the “Business Days” setting if you don’t intend to have an automation trigger on Weekends, and it’s best to use the “Calendar Days” setting if you do intend to send Automation on Weekends.
Common Issue: Multiple Automation Triggering on Monday
We sometimes have reports of multiple automation from different steps in an Automation Cycle all triggering on a Monday. This is often the result of the Business Days settings from the Automation tab of System Settings we went over above.
If you have the first setting we went over (Trigger Automation on Business Days) set to No, but the second setting we discussed (How to count days in lifecycle automation) set to Calendar Days, this can often cause an issue where multiple automation meant for different days all trigger at once on Monday.
The reason this happens is because the Calendar Days setting means automation are still scheduling automation Saturday and Sunday in their sequence, but the other setting prevents that automation from triggering. As a result, they’re pushed off until Monday. This can result in automation which was meant to send Saturday and Sunday, sending the same day as an automation meant for Monday- resulting in three day's worth of automation sending at once.
To prevent this, we recommend you use “Business Days” if not intending to send automation on Weekends and only use Calendar Days only if you do intend to send automation on Weekends.