Power Automate Wait Timer

In this Power Automate tutorial, I will show you how to use the wait timer in Power Automate.

We will also cover the below examples:

• Delay actions in Power Automate
• Power Automate pause for 1 minute
• Power Automate delay 20 seconds
• Power Automate delay until a specific time

Power Automate Wait

Power Automate Delay: The Power Automate Delay action waits for a number of units, such as Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, and Months, before proceeding with the execution of the following step.

The Power Automate Delay will pause or delay the flow until the specified timestamp within 5 seconds to 30 days. It will specify that the timestamp is in ISO-standard date and time format.

Power Automate Delay Until: Power Automate Delay until action waits for the specific Timestamp until the following action runs.

A user can manually enter the Timestamp in ISO format.

Important: Flow has a limitation: Its run duration is 30 days. After 30 days, your flow will be timed out. So, when you give a date of more than 30 days, flow will return an error message saying that it is not supported.

As an alternative process, we can use a recurrence trigger and set it to run daily. 

Power Automate Pause for 1 Minute

To pause the Power Automate flow for 1 minute, go through the below steps:

Example:

In this example, I will create a Power Automate flow that will send an email to the user with SharePoint list items arranged in ascending order based on the Registration Date column as shown below:

I need the Power Automate flow to be paused for one minute to retrieve or fetch all the items from the SharePoint list.

Follow the below instructions to create an Automated Cloud flow:

1. Log in to Power Automate, click +Create, select Instant Cloud flow, choose the trigger, manually trigger a flow, and Tap the Create button.

2. Add Get Items flow action, and set the details like Site Address and List Name.

• Order By: Give the expression to order the list of items in ascending order.

RegistrationDate asc

3. In the next step, add a Delay action under the trigger and set the below properties.

• Count: Enter the number of counts manually.
• Unit: Select the unit of time from the drop-down menu.

4. With the retrieved data, Create an HTML table with the custom columns as headers, as shown below:

5. Next, add a Send an email (V2) action and provide below details:

• To: Provide user email.
• Subject: Enter the subject of the email.
• Body: Provide the details as mentioned in the code below.

4. Now that the flow is created, let’s Save and run it manually. You can see that the flow is running, but it gets paused for 1 minute.

5. After one minute, the flow runs successfully and sends an email to the user as shown below:

This is how to delay the Power Automate flow by 1 minute using the delay action.

Power Automate Delay 20 Second

To pause the Power Automate flow for 20 seconds, go and check the example:

Example:

My requirement is to update the SharePoint list date column value.

• Condition: Project Start Date + Duration in Months = Project End Date

Here, I will create a Power Automate flow that will trigger when a SharePoint list item is created. I need to pause the flow to wait for a field value to be updated in the SharePoint list.

Follow the below steps:

1. In a Power Automate Automated cloud flow, select ‘When an item is created or modified trigger’. Choose Site Address and List Name.

2. Now, take a Compose flow action to provide the expression that will update the date column value.

addToTime(triggerBody()?['ProjectStartDate'],int(triggerBody()?['DurationinMonths']),'Month','MM/dd/yyyy')

To retrieve the value from the expression and update it in the SharePoint list, it will take some time. So, I will use Delay action to stop the flow for some time.

4. Before updating the item, use the Delay action to pause the flow for 20 seconds to stop skipping the next action.

• Select Count as ‘20‘ and Unit as ‘Second‘.

5. After that, take the Update item flow action to update the list column value. Set parameters such as Site Address, List Name, ID, and Title.

• Project End Date: Take the outputs of the compose value.

Save and test the flow manually.

6. When the flow triggers, you can check that the flow will stop for 20 seconds and will continue to run.

7. When the flow runs successfully, it will update an item in the SharePoint list, as shown in the figure below:

Power Automate Delay 1 Second:

Note:

We can not be able to delay the Power Automate flow for 1 second, because delay action will support the interval value between 5 seconds to 30 days. It will generate the error like:

BadRequest: The provided ‘Wait’ action ‘interval’ value ‘1’ ‘Second’ is not supported for the ‘Consumption’ SKU. The value must be between ‘5’ seconds and ’30’ days.

This is how you can add and use delay action in Power Automate.

Power Automate Delay Until Specific Time

To use the Power Automate delay until a specific time, check out the below example:

Example:

In this example, I will create a Microsoft Forms [Task List]. The flow will send an email, pull the form responses, and send responses to their managers.

The form can be filled out throughout the day, every weekday.

My requirement is that the email to the employee be sent only between 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Anything prior to 4:00 p.m. is delayed, and anything after 6:00 p.m. waits until 4:00 p.m. the next day. 

1. In Power Automate, create an Automated cloud flow, choose the trigger as When a new response is submitted, provide the flow, and select the create option.

• Form Id: Select the Form name from the drop-down.

2. Next, add the Get response details flow action and set the parameters as Form Id and Response Id.

Now, add the condition to send an email only during a particular time period; otherwise, it will be delayed until the next day.

3. Then, add Condition control action to get the details from the form and send an email at the particular time:

Add the below expression:

convertTimeZone(body('Get_response_details')?['submitDate'],'UTC','India Standard Time','HH:mm:ss') is equal to 16:00:00
                                                 (and)
convertTimeZone(body('Get_response_details')?['submitDate'],'UTC','India Standard Time','HH:mm:ss') is less than or equal to  18:00:00

4. Then, under True condition, select and add Get Manager Details(V2) to retrieve the manager details of the form submitted person.

• User(UPN): Select Responder Email from dynamic content.

5. Inside the True condition, take the Send an email(v2) flow action. Set the details like To, Subject, and Body.

In the To field, select Manager Mail from the dynamic content of Get Manager.

6. Under the False condition, add the Delay Until flow action to delay the flow for a specific period of time.

Write the below given expression:

formatDateTime(addHours(formatDateTime(addDays(utcNow(),1),'yyyy-MM-dd'),15),'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ')

7. Next to that, under the False condition, take the Send an email(v2) flow action. Set the details like To, Subject, and Body:

Save and test the flow manually.

6. Now, you can check if the flow will stop until a particular period of time, as shown in the below figure:

7. When the time reaches, it will send an email to the Manager with all the details as shown in the figure:

This is how to set a delay action until the specific time using Power Automate.

Conclusion

From this Power Automate tutorial, I hope you got an idea of how to add delay in Power Automate.

Along with this, I have also covered topics like:

• Power Automate Delay and Delay until action
• Power Automate wait 1 minute
• Power Automate delay 20 seconds
• Power Automate delay until a specific time

You may also like the following Power Automate tutorials:

• How to Check If an array Contains a Value using Power Automate?
• Power Automate Array Variable
• Add Outlook Calendar Events in Excel Using Power Automate
• Power Automate Send Email On Specific Date
• Power Automate dayOfWeek Function

Bijay Kumar

After working for more than 18 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (12 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.