How to send a few notifications to the reporter before the due date in Jira

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Sometimes we forget that the due date is soon. Then some tasks are left without attention for a long period of time. To avoid such situations, send notifications to the reporters or assignees to remind them about the tasks which are waiting to be completed. How? You can choose a convenient SLA solution in Jira or any kind of plugin for this.

If you have a due date and know exactly when the task is expected to be done, then it isn’t a problem to set up sending such notifications before the deadline. You can even receive a few reminders…as many as you want.

Notifications every 3 days before the deadline

If you need to get such “reminders” on the day of the deadline and also, for example, one day/3 days/5 days before the due date, you can try SLA Time and Report for Jira add-on to set sending such notifications.

There are a few steps you need to follow to achieve this goal.

Custom Fields

First of all, you have to add custom fields in the Project settings to be able to define the dates you’d like to receive notifications.

So, you need to add time stamps. 

Add the amount of time stamps which is equal to the number of notifications. 

For instance, if you want to receive 3 notifications (the first one will be 6 days before the due date, the second one - 3 days before it, the third one - the day before the deadline), add 3 “Time stamp” fields, and give them the names of the days when the reminders will be sent.
If except these days, you wish you would get a reminder on the deadline day, you don’t need to add one more time stamp, you will specify this date in the “Due date” field.

The next step is to add labels. 
Tip: Not to be confused, name them in the way the time stamps are called but add the word “Status” (for instance, Notification status July 18). Then it will be easier for you to monitor when the notifications will be sent.

That’s how it will look like in the Project settings:

Afterwards, go to the Jira issue and add all the dates:
-due date;
-date and time of the first notification;
-date and time of the second notification;
-date and time of the third notification.

Configuring notifications sending process

After you add the necessary custom fields, you can define when exactly the notifications will be sent and choose recipients. For this, open SLA Time and Report add-on, go to the “SLA Manager”, and add a new SLA configuration.

Tip: when creating a new SLA configuration, choose the SLA “Negotiated date” goal type. It will allow you to set the time goals based on the dates you chose in your custom fields.

Now you are ready to configure the SLA to monitor how much time is left till the due date and see when the notifications are going to be sent to remind you about the task.

How to set up the SLA to receive notifications:

1. Select the Configuration name, Project, Calendar. 
2. Choose the Start and Stop conditions. 
   Tip: you can set a Start condition when the issue gets a status “To Do”, and status “Done” as a finish condition. Of course, you can choose any condition you want. It all depends on your goals, but these conditions are working well for our main aim - to get notifications on the dates we chose.
   
3. Set time goals.
   Here time goals mean when you will get reminders.
   So that, if the due date is July 20, and you also want to receive reminders 6 days before the due date, 3 days before it, the day before the deadline, and on the deadline.
   Tip: Name these time goals as:
   -Notification August 1
   -Notification August 4
   -Notification August 6
   -Notification August 7
   It’s just an easy way to distinguish what you are setting up. But you can choose any other names for your time goals. 
   
4. After that you need to choose necessary custom fields in the Negotiated date field. 
   
5. When you are done, choose “Notify user in comment” actions near each time goal and select who will get notifications (these can be individuals or groups of users).
   
6. Press the button “Save” or “Save & go to report” if you want to take a look at the grid and check how much time you have till the notifications sending.
   

That’s it! You are all set.

Takeaway

If you use any Jira product (Jira Software, Jira Core, Jira Service Management) and want to configure sending notifications before the due date, you can do it using SLA plugins. To set up sending notifications whenever you need, try SLA Time and Report for Jira add-on. And check out the guide from above to make the process of sending notifications easy and fast.