A cron job is a task that runs automatically on a schedule. Instead of waiting for a person to click a button, your backend app can run by itself:
- every 5 minutes
- every hour
- every day
- every Monday
- once a month
In simple words, a cron job lets your app do work on time. Cron jobs are useful when something needs to happen regularly.
They help you:
- automate repeated work
- keep data fresh
- send reminders on time
- generate reports automatically
- clean up old data
- run background AI tasks without manual work
Common use cases #
1. Daily reports #
Generate a report every morning and save it to the app or send it to the team.
2. Reminder messages #
Check incomplete requests every day and send reminder emails or notifications.
3. Data sync #
Pull fresh data from another system every hour.
4. AI summaries #
Run a summary job every night on new documents, tickets, or conversations.
5. Monitoring #
Check every few minutes if something failed, changed, or needs attention.
Adding a cron job is done in the same way as adding any other functionality to your apps: you either specify the desired actions and the AI determines that a cron job needs to be added, or you directly state it as part of the prompt.
Simple prompts #
- Every day at 9 AM, send reminders for incomplete requests.
- Every morning, generate a daily dashboard summary.
- Every hour, sync new records from an external API.
- Every Sunday night, archive completed items.
- Every 30 minutes, check for overdue approvals.
- Every weekday at 8 AM, check all open requests and send a follow-up only if there has been no activity in the last 3 days.
- Every night, summarize all newly uploaded documents and save the summary back to the database.
- Every hour, refresh the KPI dashboard and save a snapshot for reporting.
- Every week, scan for duplicate records and mark them for review.
- etc