When creating a workflow step, you will be given the option to denote when the workflow step is triggered in relation to your employee, other workflow steps or specific calendar dates. 

It is important to know that when a workflow fires its steps, it does not do this sequentially - all steps fire simultaneously based on their trigger conditions. 

The "When should this happen?" statement is made from a combination of 4 fields which are detailed below:

• A number which is associated with field 2 to create a time statement;
• A time denotation which is used alongside fields 1 to create the time statement;
• A selection of Before/After which ties the time statement created using fields 1&2 together into the trigger date;
• The trigger date of which there are several options detailed further below.

The 'When should this happen?' fields look like this:

• In the first field, enter a number of days, weeks or months.
• In the second field, choose days, weeks, or months as appropriate.
• In the third field, choose before or after.
• In the fourth field, choose from the available trigger criteria.  The various options for this are described below.

Together, these form a statement, for example:

• 10
• days
• after
• Employee Start Date

If you want the step to trigger as soon as the trigger criteria is met you can set it to happen 0 days after.  So, to trigger a step on the employee's start date, the trigger conditions would read:

• 0
• days
• after
• Employee Start Date

To make a workflow sequential, steps can be set to trigger immediately after the previous step has completed, like so:

• 0
• days
• after
• Last Workflow Action

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Trigger Conditions

There are many options as to when you would like a workflow step to trigger. These options are listed below:

1. Start date - The employee's start date.
2. Leave date - The employee's leave date.
3. Contract end date - The date an employees contract expires/ends.
4. Resignation date - The date an employee resigned. 
5. Last working day - The employee's last working day.
6. Probationary period end date - The last day of an employee's probation. 
7. Birthday - The date of the employee's birth in the current year.
8. Anniversary Date - The yearly anniversary of the employee's start date in this current year. 
9. Submission Date - The day that a form or change is submitted. 
10. Creation Date - The day the form is assigned or published to the employee. 
11. Last workflow action - Immediately after the previous step is performed. Please note that the order of your workflow steps are critical when using this trigger or your workflow may trigger in the wrong order.
12. Interview Date - The scheduled interview date for a candidate on the system.
13. Timeoff start date - The first day of an employee's time off.
14. Timeoff end date - The last day of an employee's time off.  
15. Training expiry date - The day an employee's completed training expires. 
16. Start of current holiday year - The first day of your holiday year.
17. Start of current financial year - The first day of your financial year. 
18. None - This workflow step does not fire. 

One of the more commonly used of these is Creation Date as this will trigger the step based around the date that the workflow is published or triggered via its associated actions.  This is the best option to select if your workflow is designed to give actions that you want the associated user to address as soon as the workflow is activated, as setting this the conditions to "0 Days After Creation Date" will cause the workflow to fire immediately upon publishing.