How to create a 'Today's date' date property.

[OliviaB]

I recently discovered this smart way to create and maintain a 'Today's date' property using workflows. This can then be used in reporting, workflows and lists. 

To do this you can follow these steps: 
1) Create a custom date field property

2) Create a contact-based workflow with the enrollment triggers 'Today's date is known' OR 'Today's date in unknown'. 
3) Turn on re-enrollment for 'Today's date is known'. 
4) Add an if/then branch action with the trigger 'Today's date is known'. 
5) After the NO branch add the action 'set property value' and then set 'Today's date' to the 'date of step'. 
6) After the YES branch add the the action 'set property value' and then set 'Today's date' to the 'date of step'. 
7) The last steps after the YES branch will be a delay. To do this you will chose 'delay until a day or time' and then choose 00:15 or any other time after midnight. 

This workflow will then work in the backround to always make sure each contact has today's date saved as the value on their record. The same can be repeated for company and deal properties. 

[DColeman7 · Accepted solution]

I tried a few of the options in this post to get a reliablew "Today's Date" property on my deals. I didn't have luck for a long time!

However, I finally found a reliable solution which is to create a Scheduled Workflow, rather than adding in a delay. 

So before you create the workflow make sure you've chosen "Schedule" in the list. 

And then this workflow worked for me: 

Re-enrollment is on with all conditions. 

It updates daily and doesnt seem to slow my account. 

Hope it works for you! 

Thanks

Duncan

[stuartbalcombe · Accepted solution]

It really is so crazy that “Today’s Date” isn’t a native value available globally in HubSpot. The workflow outlined in this post is a great workaround though. I recorded a quick video of setting it up, which hopefully is helpful to folks.

I find myself reaching for Today’s date a lot in reporting and other workflows. Here's are a quick example use case of building a custom report to get visibility into onboarding activity.

[DLarsen21 · Accepted solution]

I am not sure why it needs to be so complicated. I found a solution that simply changes the date if it is not known or is over a day old. It would be nice if HubSpot simply fixed the issue by providing an option to select todays date (rolling).

[AdSimon]

Thank you. This solved it for me on the contact level. 

[CRaluy]

I also added the delay on the Unknown Branch 

New Contacts would enroll contacts twice during their first run if you dont have the options in the re-enrollment panel.  

[CCunha2]

Good work, @OliviaB! Tks share this solution with the community. 

[hel10z]

Hi Olivia B, Thanks for that but when can we see a simple solution implemented.

How many people do you need for this to be deployed/actioned?

I have used a free CRM in the fast with this option, yet a $$$ solution doesn’t have this functionality.

Looking forward for this to be actioned.

Cheers

[GEiselt]

Really appreciate you going to the trouble of finding this workaround, but it is kind of unbelievable for a CRM of HubSpot's size and prestige to not offer relative date values!

Reposting this relevant master idea that addresses this issue to upvote for others who are struggling:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Date-filters-Improve-Options-Across-all-of-Hubspot-Ma...

[Ruben_tB]

HubSpot, please add today's date as a standard date property in HubSpot.

[JOpie]

Hi -

What I posted elsewhere (similar to this at https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/How-to-create-a-Today-s-date-date-property/m-p/501703#) runs on 40k+ records. Works fine. There is a lag due to the way it's set up, but it's close enough for our purposes...

Best, John

[MW96]

Does anbody has experiences to what number of records this workaround can be supposed to be more or less reliable?

Thanks for sharing this!

[JOpie]

Thanks everyone for a great solution to a problem that shouldn't exist! HubSpot, please make it so!

Ah, and I noted that if you calculate the date using the between function, it returns a positive integer regardless of whether the close date is in the past.

You can get around that by using an additional property set by a workflow that I call 'PastDate' which after 'Today's Date' is set, checks to see if the property 'close date' was in  the past and sets this to true. Then you add a condition to the property (here: Days to close from today') so that it will only be calculated if PastDate is false. 

Workflow:

 

Days to close from today property settings:

And yes, this makes this iterative (since PastDate is generated via a workflow that only runs once a day, basically, this value will lag by one day), but I can live with that rather than having deals show up with values in multiple years because they were closed far in the past...

[SSiow]

Hi folks, I have actually tried this and found that it is not possible to keep updating the custom "Today's Date" property through a workflow as it would not keep updating the property through an endless loop automatically.

If you're testing this on your portals, you might want to keep manually re-enrolling your deals to keep the "today's date" property updated. 

[helenasolsona]

Hey @SSiow, it does keep updating daily if you set the appropriate re-enrollment triggers for your workflow.

[CFetterly]

Thank you!!! This seems like such a basic data point to have available but I'm glad there's a workaround.

[bi_developer]

I sent a direct request to VP of Global Customer Support (David Hunt) on October 14th, 2020 -- still no word, no progress.

What can the community do to push Hubspot decision makers to prioritize a 2-week sprint for a dev team to add this feature?

Or maybe they ignore this feature because a Hubspot employee said there is a workaround and we don't need the feature?

There should be a fulltime dev team making enhancements, and prioritizing "must-have" features, and this feature should have been lifted to the top of priorities last year (or actually, this feature should have been built into the original version1, out of the box). 

Because we don't have this feature, I've given up on Hubspot and do 90% of reporting outside of Hubspot. The charting tools are weak, Hubspot doesn't have a web-based SQL editor to query on HS data (which would solve the today's date problem with getdate() and datediff functions), and it doesn't have must-have features like Today's Date.  Customer support is excellent, but even when they made these workflows for us, it broke and gave incorrect data. The workaround workflows is not a suitable solution. 

@PamCotton  @OliviaB Tell whoever prioritizes the dev team for enhancements to call me, and I will explain face to face if need be.  Or come and try your best workflows in our system and give us a Today's Date without it blowing up. Customer Support couldn't do it. It worked for 1 day and then broke, giving wrong data.

Quite unhappy with the response on this feature.

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Having-a-dynamic-today-field-in-the-Time-between-feat...

[PamCotton]

Hello @bi_developer, thank you for your feedback,  I would like to apologize for the frustrations, data issues, and business impact this has caused.  

At the moment our best recommendation is to please leave your feedback on the idea you specifically share, Upvoting in that idea will specifically alert our Product Team to the popularity of this request. Doing so will also auto-notify you if/when this functionality becomes available within HubSpot. You may read more about how that review process works here.

Kindly,

Pam

[Tardiffp]

Hi Pam, regardsing your recommendation to @bi_developer  "leave your feedback on the idea you specifically share, Upvoting in that idea will specifically alert our Product Team to the popularity of this request. " Haven't they already don that here? And I understand the concept of counting upvotes to determine interest but there are so many legs to the same topic just counting upvotes to one particular post total underestimates the criticality of resolving this issue.

From what I've read customers have been posting for years, not weeks or even months, requesting a solution to this issue yet the best answer is to post more requests and wait? Even a letter to the VP of Customer Service received no response! Maybe if HubSpot shared an active list of issues they are currently working on solving that is more important than this we'd be a little more patient. I am a new customer to HubSpot and am seriously questioning the decision to continue with this CRM, therefore, I'm sure others are too. Please give us confidence we made the right decision by not only listening to our concerns but promptly resolving them.

[HubSpotMaster]

@OliviaB Are there any updates from the Hubspot side? Seems like everyone is having to use tools outside of HubSpot or game the system to get a simple requirement so we can use calculated properties effectively or use for BI reporting. Any updates would be great. 

Thanks

Adam

[Regily_Scott]

Ok, so I'm not the only one who thinks it's a little crazy that we can't use something like 'Today'

Has anyone from HubSpot confirmed why these contacts are not enrolling? I have built out mine with delays, seems like it should work, but I'll need to wait on the schedule to confirm. 

 It's essentially the same as the original solution by Olivia. Difference is I do the delay in the Yes branch before executing the step to 'set property value' to 'date of the step'. 

My workflow starts after Midnight and will enroll all the contacts. (We have 5k-6k currently, should stay under 10k for quite sometime) The Unknown branch will set the date immediately, the Yes branch will give it an hour delay befor hitting all of those. It will re-enroll if the Date is Known, but won't re-enroll if unknown. In reality, no contact that ever re-enrolls will ever have a blank value. 

[PamCotton]

Thank you for sharing @CBader and @2chars .

Kindly,

Pam

[CBader]

Here is my solution to a date stamp for Today's Date in Deals, similar to the solution by @helenasolsona :

 

It works well for Deals, but we only have hundreds, not millions.

It would really help to have a Today's date option built in to the Time Between date calculation properties so we don't have to use a workaround like this.

I'm hoping HubSpot can make the date calculation options much more robust soon.

[RMietti]

Hello @CBader ,
How did you configure the workflow run schedule? Does it run anytime, or did you schedule a specific time of day to run?
Regards

[CBader]

Great question. I set the workflow to run every night between midnight and 3 a.m., so it's only running during non-busy times. Hope this helps!