Schedule a rule to business hours only

A rule can be scoped to only run inside business hours, or only outside them. Useful for after-hours auto-replies, in-hours auto-routing, and anything that needs to behave differently when the team is or isn’t around.

Before you start

• A working automation rule
• Opening Hours configured for your workspace — the schedule restriction reads from that

Steps

1. Open the rule. Go to Settings → Automation Rules, find the rule, and open it.

2. Find the Schedule section. It’s in the rule’s settings panel, alongside Throttling and the Enable toggle.

3. Pick a restriction. Choose one of:

   
   Always — no restriction, fires whenever the trigger event occurs (default)
   Inside business hours — fires only when the workspace’s opening hours say “open”
   Outside business hours — fires only when “closed”

4. Save the rule. The schedule restriction is per-rule, not per-branch — every branch in the rule shares the same schedule.

Verify it worked

Open the Manual Executions tab and watch the rule fire over the next few hours. Filter by the rule name. If you set “Outside business hours,” you should see no executions during open windows; if you set “Inside business hours,” no executions during closed windows.

Use cases

• After-hours auto-reply. Trigger = Message received, Schedule = Outside business hours, Action = Send Email Studio template “We’re closed — back at 9am.”
• In-hours routing. Trigger = Conversation created, Schedule = Inside business hours, Action = Assign to live team. Pair with a separate rule for after-hours that routes to the on-call agent.
• In-hours-only escalation. Trigger = SLA at risk, Schedule = Inside business hours. Avoids paging people at 3am for SLAs they can’t act on.

Notes

• The schedule check uses the workspace’s Opening Hours, including timezone and holiday rules. If those aren’t set up correctly, the schedule restriction will misbehave — verify your opening hours first.
• The schedule restriction is not the same as a Schedule trigger. Schedule triggers run a rule on a cron-like time pattern. Schedule restrictions gate event-triggered rules to certain windows. You can combine them, but they answer different questions.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Rule fires outside business hours even though it’s set to inside-only. Fix: Check the timezone on your Opening Hours configuration. The most common cause is a workspace timezone mismatch between the rule and the hours definition.

See also

• Opening Hours
• Throttle a rule to prevent spam
• Trigger types reference