Slack reminders for teams: what /remind cannot do and how to run recurring checks
A Slack reminder automates the nudge and none of the follow-through. /remind fits a note to yourself or a plain message to a channel on a fixed day. It does not fit a check that needs answers: a channel reminder has no owner, cannot be edited and records no replies, and Slack documents reminders only for yourself or a channel, not for another person. We recommend keeping the channel reminder for the ask and adding a second recurring reminder for whoever reads the replies, set for the deadline. Below are the formats, the limits, and the point where a scheduled workflow or an agent earns its place.
How to set a Slack reminder for yourself or a channel
Personal reminders live in your To-dos tab. A channel reminder uses the format in Slack's help page on setting a reminder: /remind [#channel] [what] [when]. Slack's own example is /remind #marketing-team to submit expenses every Thursday. Send it and Slack schedules the message.
The details that decide whether it behaves:
- Repeats are by day, not by interval. "Every Monday" works and "every hour" does not, so there is no hourly nudge.
- The time defaults to 9 a.m. A reminder set for a specific day, such as "tomorrow" or "every Tuesday", arrives at 9 a.m. in your time zone unless you change your default reminder time under Preferences. If you want 3 pm, say the time in the command.
- Write dates in American English. Slack recommends it, so write "every Thursday at 3pm" rather than a local shorthand.
- Guests cannot create channel reminders. A contractor or client who is a guest in your workspace has to ask a full member.
- A channel reminder cannot be edited. To change it, type
/remind listin the channel where it posts, delete it, and create it again.
What /remind cannot do
/remind was built for one person's memory, so a recurring chase asks more of it than it was designed to give.
It has no owner. A channel reminder posts a message and nobody is assigned to answer it. There is no queue of who has acted on it and no history beyond the messages themselves, so when the person who set it up is out, nothing hands the chase to anyone.
It records no completion. The help page covers how to create, list and delete a channel reminder. It has no way to mark one as answered or to see who responded. For team work, record who accepted the request and whether it is finished, which takes a task or list and not a reminder.
A recurring reminder cannot be set for another person through Slack's API. Slack's reminders.add reference marks the user argument as no longer supported, returns cannot_add_others_recurring when a recurring reminder is aimed at another team member, and warns that the reminder methods are being retired and have become degraded or useless. Do not build a process on them. The help page does not say whether typing /remind @person still works in the message box, so test it once in your own workspace before you rely on it.
It does not tell you when it has stopped. If someone deletes the channel reminder, or recreates it with different wording, nothing marks the change. You find out when the Thursday message does not appear, and only if you notice the absence.
Personal reminders leave you doing the work too: people roll them over by hand when the moment passes, and several "remind me tomorrow" reminders land together at 9 am, each with its own pop-up and sound. A reminder is a prompt for you, and you stay the engine.
Choosing the tool for a recurring check
| Tool | Good for | Stops at |
|---|---|---|
/remind to yourself | Your own deadlines | Only notifies you; moving it is manual |
/remind in a channel | A fixed-day message to a group | No owner, no edit, no record of who answered |
| Scheduled workflow in Workflow Builder | A scheduled post or form with structure | Available on paid plans; someone still reads the answers |
| Slackbot task | Slack's other suggestion for a more complex recurring message | Free and Pro workspaces get Slackbot only as a trial or preview by default |
| A task or list tool | Assigned work with a due date and a done state | Someone has to create and chase each item |
| An agent in the thread | A plain-language check that posts and reports | Needs approval to create, and a person for judgment calls |
Slack's own help page sends anything beyond a simple team nudge to a scheduled workflow or a Slackbot task, so a recurring chase that needs an answer has already outgrown /remind by Slack's description. A workflow set to start on a schedule runs without anyone triggering it, which is a real step up. It collects structure. It does not tell you on Friday morning who has not answered, and that reading is the job a coordinator is usually hired for.
Pick the row by one question: after the message goes out, who finds out that someone did not answer? If the answer is "me, eventually", you are using a reminder where you need a check.
Before you reach for a workflow or an agent, try the cheaper fix: pair each channel reminder with a recurring reminder or calendar block for the person who reads the replies, set for the deadline and worded as the job, such as "Read the timesheet replies in #design and chase the rest." The channel reminder carries the ask. The second one carries the follow-through, and it is the one that sends someone back to the thread. We recommend this while one thread is short enough to read in a few minutes. Move to automation when the reading and chasing become the chore.
Anatomy of a recurring check someone answers for
A reminder tells people to do something. A check asks a question, expects an answer from a named person by a stated time, and does something when the answer does not come. Define five parts before you schedule anything:
- The question. One question that can be answered in one line: "Is your timesheet for this week submitted? Reply yes, or give the blocker."
- The owner. One person who answers for the check running, usually you, plus one named backup.
- The audience. Who is asked, written down as a list of people, not "the team". Name anyone on leave that week and date the exclusion.
- The deadline. When replies are due, in the channel's time zone, such as Friday 10 am.
- The follow-up. What happens at the deadline: a summary of who replied and who did not, and who contacts the people who did not. A run with no replies should say so in the summary, and the backup checks whether the post reached the channel.
A channel reminder can only be deleted and recreated, never edited, so whoever rewrites the wording can end the check without anyone noticing. This is a recommendation, not a Slack rule: keep the owner and schedule of every recurring check somewhere other than the reminder itself, as a short list in a pinned message or a shared page with one line per check giving its owner, schedule, audience and deadline. When Slack forces you to delete and recreate, update that line the same minute. The same list catches a check that was cancelled by accident or now points at an archived channel, so review it monthly against your scheduled jobs.
Say a 12-person design agency wants timesheets in by Friday at noon. The operations lead sets /remind #design to submit timesheets every Thursday and scrolls the channel on Friday to see who replied. The reminder posts at 9 a.m. by default, not at the hour the lead intended, and it names the channel and not a person. Two freelancers are guests, who cannot create channel reminders and so could never take over the chase. If the lead is at a client site that Friday, nobody reads the replies.
Written as a check, the same job asks for a reply in the thread, "timesheet submitted, or the blocker". The lead is the owner and the studio manager the backup. The audience is the ten full members listed by name, and the lead asks the two guests directly once a week. The deadline is Friday 10 am, and at that time a summary lists who replied, who did not, and any blockers named.
Running the check with the Kipwise agent
If you already use Slack for the team's conversation, a scheduled request to the Kipwise agent can carry the whole specification. Per the product description, you mention the agent in a thread or channel and ask in plain language for a request to run later or on a schedule. It uses your Slack timezone when available and posts the result in the channel, with the same tools and permissions as a live request from you.
A request might read: "Every Thursday at 3 pm, post in this channel asking each person on this list to reply with their timesheet status by Friday 10 am. On Friday at 10:15, summarise who replied and who did not." Ask for the reply summary in the request itself, and read the first few Friday summaries against the thread by eye before you trust them.
How it behaves, as the product works today:
- Approval once. Creating a scheduled task needs your approval once, together with the list of changes the task may make on its own. Later runs do not ask again for those. Any other change, such as a write to a connected tool, still shows a fresh Approve or Deny card, and the card expires after 30 minutes.
- Visible lifecycle. You can list or cancel your jobs and ask what happened on previous runs, including failures. That answers the "did the check silently stop" problem that a deleted channel reminder leaves open.
- Your permissions. The job runs with the same tools and permissions as a request from you, so a check that reads a connected tool reads only what you can read.
What stays with a person: judgment calls, escalations and customer conversations. A scheduled message can ask who owes a timesheet. It cannot decide whether a late timesheet is a payroll problem. The decision to hire a coordinator for relationship-heavy chasing is still a human decision; the before-you-hire page for virtual assistants lays out how to weigh it.
On price: the agent costs $10 per user per month with a 3-user minimum. Installing starts a trial of $2 for 7 days on the fast model; a saved card or a paid Slack plan gives a $10, 14-day trial with all models. Check the live pricing page before you plan around those figures.
For deeper treatment of scheduled-job failure modes, see scheduling recurring AI agent jobs in Slack without silent failures. For tracking open items that outlive one run, see keeping follow-ups from falling through the cracks in Slack, and for turning replies into a status roll-up, see getting team status updates in Slack without an ops coordinator.
Start with one chase
Pick the one recurring chase you currently do by hand, write its five parts in a pinned message, and run it for two weeks with the paired reminder for the reader. Track replies per run, not reminders sent: how many people were asked, how many replied by the deadline and how many you had to chase by hand. If the hand-chased share is not falling by week four, the question or the audience needs rework. If you already use the Kipwise agent, mention it in that channel and ask for the first scheduled run with the summary built in. If you do not, the same five parts work for a Workflow Builder post with you reading the replies, which shows how much of the chase is the nudge and how much is the reading.
The other /remind neighbours are in Kipwise's list of Slack slash commands.
