Checking an automation will actually fire — Help

An automation that matches nothing looks exactly like an automation that is working. It sits on the list, switched on, saying "14 days before the event, email the client", and it is only a fortnight later, when a client asks why they never got their final details, that anyone finds out it never had a single booking to fire on.

Show upcoming answers that before the date has to pass. It takes one action on your automation, runs it against your real bookings for the next 30 days, and lists what will happen: the date the client gets it, the booking it lands on, and beside anything that will not run, the reason.

This article covers where the button is, how to read the panel, and the "Not listed" summary underneath it, which is where the answer usually turns out to be.

The three buttons, and which question each answers

Every email action in the automation editor carries three buttons:

Preview answers "how does this email read", with the merge fields filled in against a made-up client and booking.
Send test to me answers "does it arrive, and does it look right in a real inbox".
Show upcoming answers "will this ever go out, and to whom".

The first two are about the email. The third is about the rule, and it is the one nothing used to answer.

A Create tasks action gets Show upcoming as well, on its own. There is no email to preview or test there, but "will this workflow actually land on anything" is exactly as worth asking.

The panel opens under the actions, in the same slot the preview uses, so the two replace each other.

Reading the list

The heading tells you what you are looking at: Upcoming, next 30 days, with the action's own name beside it, since an automation can have several actions and the panel is only ever about the one you clicked.

Each row is one booking:

The date is when the recipient gets it, not when 1pm picks the booking up. A client email is queued the day before and held for 24 hours in Sending soon, so those two dates are a day apart. A note above the list says so on the actions where it applies. Tasks and internal emails have no hold, so their dates are the same either way.
The booking name.
A detail line underneath: the address the email is going to, the workflow the tasks come from, or the reason it will not run.

Rows come in three kinds.

Will run. The detail line names the recipient or the workflow. Nothing more to do.

Blocked, in red with a warning triangle. This is the whole reason the panel exists. The line carries the same sentence the automation itself would have written into its history, so what you read here is exactly what you would have read afterwards, only sooner. The usual ones:

"This event has no client contact set, so there's nobody to email."
The client contact, or the booking, no longer exists.
The recipient cannot be emailed, for example because the address has unsubscribed or bounced.
No workflow chosen, so there are no tasks to create, or the workflow has since been deleted.
An internal email with nobody to send to, for the crew, organiser or account address it was pointed at.
"Didn't send" with the reason, when it already ran for this booking and failed. It will not be retried on its own.
"Today's run was at 2:45 PM, so this won't send on its own." The automation checks bookings once a day. A booking whose day is today but which it didn't pick up (confirmed this afternoon, say) is not reached later, so send it by hand with Send automation on the client contact's Bookings tab.

Already run, greyed out. It fired for that booking already, so it will not fire again. The line says what happened: Already sent, Already sent by hand, Queued in Sending soon, or Cancelled with the reason. These are shown rather than hidden on purpose, because "why didn't it send a second time?" is a real question and an empty row would not answer it.

A client email runs once per event date, so a booking that moved since its email went out is listed as due again for its new date.

If more than 25 bookings match, the rest are counted under the list as "Plus N more further out, not shown" rather than quietly dropped.

"Not listed" is where the answer usually is

Under the rows sits a short summary of the bookings that fell inside the window and were filtered out before they ever became rows. There are two lines it can show, and between them they explain most rules that look dead:

"4 events on these dates (3 Tentative, 1 Lead) won't fire: this trigger only runs on Confirmed events." Date-based automations only run on Confirmed bookings, and for a trigger that fires after the event, on Completed ones as well. A pipeline full of Tentative holds produces exactly no automation emails, which is correct behaviour and completely invisible until something says it out loud.
"2 events on these dates came in on a different form, so the 'Wedding lead' filter excludes them." If you narrowed the automation to one lead type, everything from another lead type is out, including the bookings you were picturing when you wrote the rule.

An empty list with nothing under it means something different from an empty list with two lines under it. The first means there is genuinely nothing in the next month. The second means there is plenty, and your rule is not reaching it.

What cannot be forecast, and why

Only the two date-based triggers can be listed ahead of time: so many days before the event date, and so many days after it. Those dates are known in advance, so the answer is arithmetic.

Every other trigger fires on a human action nobody can predict. A quote gets accepted, an invoice gets sent, a lead comes in. Rather than showing you an empty list that reads as "nothing will happen", the panel says which action it is waiting on, in plain words: "This one runs: 3 days after a quote is sent. That's someone else's move, so there's nothing to list ahead of time." If a form filter is narrowing it as well, it says that too, because that is just as common a reason an edge-triggered rule looks dead.

Ask for upcoming on a wait and it tells you to check one of the actions below it instead. A wait sends nothing on its own.

Waits are still accounted for. If an action has a wait above it, the forecast shifts its dates out by that many days, exactly as the real thing will on the day.

A few things worth knowing

It is a forecast, not a promise. It reads your bookings as they stand right now. Confirm one this afternoon and it joins the list. Cancel one and it drops off. Anything that stops an automation on the day (your monthly email allowance, a suppressed address, someone cancelling the queued email in Sending soon) is not visible a fortnight out.
It reads no differently from the real thing. The forecast asks the same questions in the same order the automation asks them when it runs, which is why a blocked row's wording matches what you would have seen in the history afterwards.
It works on an unsaved automation. Build the rule, hit Show upcoming, and adjust before you ever save it. Nothing is sent, nothing is queued, and nothing is recorded.
It uses your day, not the server's. The window starts from today in your account's time zone, so the list does not shift by a day depending on the hour you look at it.
Today counts. Before today's run, a booking due today is listed as will run. After it, the row shows what the run did, or says the run has passed and gives the time in your account's time zone.

A quick way to debug a rule that is not firing

Open the automation and click Show upcoming on the action you expected to send.
Rows listed, all fine? The rule works. If a client still says they got nothing, the answer is downstream: check the Sending soon queue and Recent activity, then when an automation email does not send.
Rows listed, all blocked? Read the reason. It is nearly always a missing client contact on the booking.
Nothing listed, but a "Not listed" line? Your bookings are the wrong status, or on a different lead type. Fix the status or widen the filter.
Nothing listed and nothing under it? Check the trigger itself. A "60 days before" rule on an account whose next booking is in three weeks has nothing to do yet, and that is not a fault.

Automations covers triggers, actions, the Sending soon queue and Recent activity.
When an automation email does not send covers the failures that turn up after the fact.
Tracking events from lead to done covers the statuses date-based automations depend on.
Tasks and checklists covers the workflows a Create tasks action draws from.
Capturing leads with a form covers the lead types a form filter narrows to.