Tasks and deadlines

Audience: ISMS Admin.

The shape of it: Certaria creates the recurring work from your task templates, then chases the owners. It never marks anything done on your behalf.

Where recurring tasks come from

Once a month, Certaria creates the compliance tasks that are now due from your task templates, covering monthly, quarterly and annual routines in the same run. Your ISMS administrator gets a Teams summary of everything created.

This is what makes recurring ISO 27001 activities appear on their own under Compliance Tasks rather than depending on somebody remembering. The reminder flows then chase them as their due dates approach.

Tasks with no owner are chased to nobody

A task needs a named owner and a due date to be chased. Both reminders address the owner directly, so a task with neither is created, sits there, and generates no reminder for anyone. Assign owners when the monthly run creates them, not when you notice them overdue.

The two reminders

	When	Who it tells	What it does
Approaching	Each morning, on the UK clock	Owners, by email and Teams	Looks ahead for tasks, corrective actions and policy reviews falling due inside your warning period
Overdue	Once a day	Owners in Teams; your administrator by email if the total passes your threshold	Lists what has passed its due date

Both only send reminders and never change your records. Nothing is auto-closed, auto-extended or auto-reassigned.

Two different clocks, and it is worth knowing which is which

Certaria’s own built-in schedules follow the UK clock, so the approaching-deadline and overdue checks stay at the same local time through British Summer Time.

The notification hours you chose during onboarding are UTC, so those shift by an hour against UK time in summer. That is the setting to check if a reminder starts arriving an hour later than you expect. See Onboarding.

The escalation threshold

The overdue check emails your ISMS administrator when the total number of overdue items climbs past a threshold you set. It is a signal that the process is slipping rather than that one person is late, which is why it goes to you and not to the owners.

Set it to a number that would genuinely worry you. Set it too low and it becomes daily noise you learn to ignore, which is worse than not having it.

What gets chased

Three things share the same reminders:

• Compliance tasks, from your templates or created by hand.
• Corrective actions, opened when an incident reaches Review.
• Policy reviews, when a document’s review date approaches. See Publish a policy.

What an auditor asks

• Show me your ISMS ran continuously. The monthly generation record plus completed tasks across the year.
• What happens when something is late? The overdue reminders and the escalation threshold.
• Who owns this control? The task owner, which is why unowned tasks are a genuine finding rather than an untidiness.

Common failure modes

Symptom	Cause	Fix
No tasks appeared this month	No task templates match the period, or the monthly generator is switched off	Check your templates, then the flow in the solution’s cloud flows list
An owner is not being chased	The task has no owner, or the person has no linked user account	Assign the owner; check the People record. See Import your people
Reminders arrive an hour out in summer	The hours you set during onboarding are UTC. Certaria’s built-in schedules are not	Expected. Adjust those hours if the drift matters
Administrator emails every day	The overdue threshold is set too low	Raise it to a number that means something
Duplicate tasks each month	Templates overlapping, for example a monthly and a quarterly covering the same activity	Consolidate the templates

Next

• Incidents and concerns, which create corrective actions
• What your people see in Teams
• The compliance summary and audit pack