It happens most often with pre-onboarding flows, where a new hire's record only appears in your HRIS a few days before they start. It also happens with backdated promotions, transfers that were entered after the fact, and manual enrollments you run to catch people who were missed.
Pyn gives you three ways to handle it.
An example
Take a pre-onboarding flow with three messages:
Message | Timing | Importance |
Message 1 | 14 days before start date | High |
Message 2 | 7 days before start date | Low |
Message 3 | 2 days before start date | High |
Now imagine someone is enrolled 5 days before their start date. Messages 1 and 2 are both overdue at the moment of enrollment. Message 3 is still in the future.
Option 1: Send the overdue messages (default)
By default, any message that is already overdue is sent immediately when the person is enrolled. Everything else runs on its normal schedule.
In the example above:
Message 1 is sent immediately
Message 2 is sent immediately
Message 3 is sent as scheduled, 2 days before the start date
Use this when every message in the flow still matters even if it arrives late. A welcome message, a link to paperwork, or an equipment request is usually still useful the day it lands, even if it was meant to go out a week earlier.
Option 2: Skip selected messages for late enrollments
You can specify that particular messages should be skipped when someone is enrolled late. The rest of the flow behaves normally.
If Message 2 is configured to be skipped for late enrollments:
Message 1 is sent immediately
Message 2 is skipped
Message 3 is sent as scheduled, 2 days before the start date
This works well for messages that lose their meaning once the moment has passed. A prompt to complete something before a deadline that has already gone, or a countdown message, tends to create more confusion than value when it arrives out of sequence.
This is an advanced feature. Let us know which messages you would like skipped for late enrollments and we will configure it for you.
Option 3: Manual enrollment with Verify mode
If you want to make the call person by person, enroll them manually:
Enroll the person in the flow.
Set their start date.
Select Verify mode.
Verify mode shows you the overdue and upcoming messages before anything is sent, so you can choose exactly which ones go out.
This is the right approach for one-off situations, or where the person's circumstances are unusual enough that you would rather look at the list yourself than rely on a rule.
Which option to use
Option 1 if late messages are still worth sending. This is the default and needs no setup.
Option 2 if the same handful of messages should always be skipped when someone is enrolled late. Set it once, applies to everyone.
Option 3 if you want to decide case by case for a specific person.
Options 1 and 2 apply automatically to every enrollment in the flow. Option 3 applies only to the person you enroll manually.