It is common for Administrators to require the tasks within their stages to be completed by a specific date. For example, you may require applicants to submit all application materials by a deadline, or your reviewers to complete all of their reviews. Our Deadlines feature will allow you to apply these limits to your Stages on your site. If you wish to apply a deadline to a specific applicant task you can refer to How to Set a Deadline on an Applicant Task.
How to Apply a Stage Deadline
Stage deadlines prevent applicants, recommenders or reviewers from accessing a stage and all the tasks in that stage after the deadline has passed.
You can apply a deadline to a stage with the following steps:
- Go to your Workflow
- Click on the Name of the stage to access the stage configurations.
- Click on Settings
- Click on the Close Date/ Deadline field to access the Date Calendar
- Select a deadline date you wish to apply to the stage.
- Add a Time for when the deadline will be closed. The time zone that is set will be based on your sites time zone. However, to the end user, the time will be converted to display in the user's time zone.
- Optional: Enter a grace period (in hours). Grace periods allow users to access or edit a stage after the deadline has passed. This grace period will not be displayed to the users. This value can only be a whole number and the grace period cannot be placed with a decimal, such as 1.5.
- You can now click Save to confirm your changes.
Example:
NOTE: The stage deadline will be automatically applied to all tasks within the stage. However, if an individual task has its own task deadline, the task deadline will override the stage deadline, provided that the deadline on the task is before the stage deadline.
How Deadlines Work
Deadlines require users to complete stages by certain dates so your process can stay on schedule. Once a deadline for a stage passes, users can no longer access or edit the tasks within the stage.
Deadlines on Reviewer Tasks
Since Reviewer stages can only contain one reviewer task per stage, if you wish to apply a deadline to the reviewer task you can do so by applying the deadline to the Reviewer Stage instead.