Transactions and Scheduled Actions

Important Support and updates for Process Builder have ended as of December 31, 2025. This means that support won't be provided for any process and bugs in the Process Builder product won't be fixed. See Workflow Rules & Process Builder End of Support.

After December 31, 2025, existing processes continue to run, and you can activate, deactivate, and edit them; however, we recommend using Flow Builder. To migrate existing processes, plan your switch to Flow Builder and use the Migrate to Flow tool. For new automations, create flows in Flow Builder.

Scheduled actions aren’t performed independently. They’re batched in one transaction with other actions that are scheduled to execute at the same time, have the same process version ID, and are executed by the same user ID. This behavior can cause you to exceed your Apex governor limits if the batch’s actions execute DML operations or SOQL queries.

A DML operation is used each time a Salesforce record is created, updated, or deleted, such as when a process executes a Create a Record action. A SOQL query is used each time Salesforce looks up information about an existing record, such as when a process executes an Update Records action. For details on Apex governor limits, see Process Limits.

To improve performance further and help avoid Apex governor limits, design scheduled actions to take advantage of bulkification.

Tip Design a process with a scheduled action so that it doesn’t execute mixed DML operations. A single transaction can’t mix DML operations on data objects (such as Account), Setup objects (such as User Role), and external objects. For example, you can’t update an account and a user role in a single transaction.

If a process has more than one group of scheduled actions and a group fails to execute in a batch:

• Prior groups of scheduled actions in that batch’s transaction are successful.
• The immediate actions for that process are successful.
• All scheduled actions in that group aren’t executed.
• Each remaining group of scheduled actions in that batch is executed in a separate transaction.