What is a scheduled task?
A scheduled task runs at a time you set, without someone clicking a button. The trigger is the clock. The work might be a report, a reminder, or an agent checklist.
Also called: cron, cron job
In plain English
Every Monday at 8 is a schedule. A new booking is not. Schedules are how weekly reports and opening checklists happen when the owner is on a job. If the source file was not updated, the schedule will faithfully send a stale report. A schedule is a promise that the shop is closed or not. If the task runs at 7 a.m. and the notes are not in yet, it should complain, not invent. Put the expected input in the task name. Check it the morning after you first turn it on, and again after the first Monday holiday, because holidays are when schedules embarrass you. If the shop is closed, the task should know. A Monday reminder sent on a holiday is a self-inflicted complaint.
How an owner would use it
Schedule the things that are already true on a cadence: a reminder the day before, a Monday cash note, a weekly SOP glance. Do not schedule a customer email that depends on a fact you have not entered.
Common mistakes
A schedule will happily send a stale or empty report forever. Owners set 'every morning' and never look again. Cron is the older name for the same clock trigger. Do not schedule a customer email that depends on a fact nobody has typed yet. Do not use a schedule to poll a system every minute if that system can send a webhook. You will hit rate limits and create noise.
A worked example
A coffee shop
The 6 a.m. note only if the sheet exists
This is an illustration, not a customer result. At 6 a.m. a scheduled task drafts the opener's note from the pastry count the closer entered. If that cell is empty, the message says the count is missing. It does not guess how many croissants are in the case.
Related terms
Prompts and guides
Questions owners ask
What is a scheduled task?
A scheduled task is work that starts because the clock hit a time you chose, such as a morning report or a day-before reminder.
How do I use scheduled tasks with AI?
Have the schedule gather real inputs and draft from those. If the input is missing, the task should say so instead of filling the gap.
What should a scheduled task do when the input is missing?
Say it is missing and notify the person who can fix it. Filling the gap with a plausible number or last week's copy is the failure. Silence is the other failure, because you think it ran.
Product guides are on AI apps for business.