Wait steps

In your workflow, you may want to pause your workflow until either a certain amount of time passes or until some condition is reached. To support that, Relay.app offers a flexible and powerful Wait step (also known as a "delay" step in other tools like Zapier and Make.com). Here's how to use it:

Creating a Wait step

To create a Wait step, navigate to the flow control menu, where you'll see two options:

• Wait for time

• Wait for object to match rule

Depending on the data currently available in your workflow, you may see an additional shortcut to a special type of wait step, for example "Wait for reply" to an email, as pictured below.

The Flow Control menu contains the Wait step options

Wait for time

If you want to wait for a defined amount of time, select Wait for time. Within Wait for time, you'll see two options:

• Wait for some time - use this if you want to hard code an exact amount of time

• Wait until a date - use this if you want to use a reference date from a variable in your workflow

Wait for some time

In this option, you'll specific an exact number of minutes, hours, or days you want the workflow to wait, and it will be exactly the same amount in every workflow run.

Hard coding an amount of time to wait

Wait until a date

For a more dynamic experience that uses your workflow data, here's what you'll see when you select Wait until a date. You'll first select a reference date from within your workflow, then you can set an optional offset from that date. For example, you can wait for two days after the send time of an email or the upcoming date of a calendar event.

How to select a date variable as a reference date in a wait step

Wait for object to match a rule

In addition to waiting for a specific amount of time to pass or until a specific date is reached, Relay.app lets you set more advanced wait steps that watch and object until it reaches a certain state. For example, you can wait until an email is starred in your email client or a deal is closed in your CRM.

First, you need to select the object you want to watch.

How to select an object for your Wait step

Next, you need to select what Rule you're watching for. Here's an example, in which we're waiting for an email to be starred.

An example of waiting for an email to be starred

Once your wait step is setup, you can create a test run to make sure it behaves as you expect.

Why is my Wait step not working?

If a wait step is not working, it's might be for one of these reasons:

1. Wait steps can take up to one hour to be registered (we're working to improve this!).

2. Your "wait" filter conditions may be set up incorrectly.

3. There may have been another error earlier in your run.

If you've checked all of those, it may be a bug! If so, please email [email protected] with a screenshot or video recording of the event you expected to activate the wait step.