The 5 Minute Time-Based Workflow (or 15 Minute, or 30 Minute…)

Salesforce workflows come in 2 flavors – real time and time-based workflows.  Time-based workflows are evaluated at the time interval you set – some number of hours or days after another date or time field on the record. But you can’t set any time increment less than an hour… or can you?

But I’m an impatient guy.  Sometimes, I don’t want a workflow to fire right now, but I can’t wait an hour.  There may be some business processes that need to be completed in 5 minutes, or half an hour.

For example – our Sales Reps may make several changes to an Opportunity over the course of 15 minutes, but I don’t want to send workflow update emails after every change.  But it is important that the Sales Manager is notified as soon as possible.  So I’d like to send a workflow email 20 minutes after the last change.