Cron in plain English

Build-along · ~12 min at your own keyboard

Scheduled triggers are the 'while you sleep' half of automation: every weekday at 6am, every Friday at 4, first of the month. Modern platforms take the schedule in plain English. Rule stands: schedule the deterministic scripts, not the unattended LLM. This is the engine behind lead-follow-up automation that never forgets a day-3 check-in.

Your starter: Monthly export pull

Workflow steps

Make it yours: Set the day of the month your clients' exports are ready, name the folder and the naming pattern, and decide the one condition that stops the run and asks you.

MONTHLY PULL: runs on the [day] of each month at [time]

1. For each entity code in [list]: pull the general-ledger export from [source] into [folder]/[entity code]-[month].csv.
2. Check the header row matches last month's. A changed header stops the run for that entity and writes one line to [log].
3. Scan every file for a Social Security number pattern, an EIN pattern or a bank account number. A hit stops the run for that entity: nothing identifiable goes in to the next step.
4. For the files that passed, run the exceptions pipeline and write the tab.
5. Send me one line per entity: pulled, stopped (why), or exceptions written (count).

Never retry a stopped entity. Never pull from a source not on the list. Never open a file that failed the scan.

The coach checks that what you paste back is your own work. The starter pasted back unchanged won't pass.

Do this

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Share what happened

Paste the schedule, evidence of two untouched automatic runs, and their outputs (trimmed).