Salesforce Scheduled Flows; how to run a scheduled Flow more than once a day!

There was a time that scheduled automation was beyond the reach of an admin. That time was before the Winter 20' release. Yes, you could (and still can… but don’t…) make time delayed automations using Process Builder and Workflow but there are flaws in this approach. The main one being that in order for the automation to be scheduled, it has to have been triggered by a record create and/or edit and that means manual user intervention. Hardly convenient.

So here we are, some time later and I have need for scheduling a flow. That need is to regularly run processing on Opportunities once they’ve been closed. I won’t go into the reasons why the automation can’t be triggered at the time that the Opportunity is closed but trust me when I say, it’s lame.

What I really wanted to be able to do was mimic Apex Batch processing and run the Flow more than once a day. You may or may not be aware that currently, the most frequently that you can run a scheduled Flow is once a day, at a set time. Not bad for a humble admin but this humble admin was not satisfied. I wanted to run my schedule more than once a day. Queue lightbulb moment. What if I created more than one Scheduled Flow to do the same thing and just ran the cloned Flow at a different time.

Well, you guessed right — it worked. Otherwise this would be the most disappointing blog post ever. And there you have it. What I don’t know is how many cloned Flows and therefore scheduled runs I can do per day. I suspect it depends on the complexity of the Flow, other Flows that may impact the records/objects involved, number of records typically being processed and other usage limits. In short, I’m happy with twice a day for now and if I want to up the frequency then I’ll have to run tests etc.

TL DR; you can clone a Scheduled Flow and run it at different times throughout the day, thus circumventing the limit of once a day.