Duplicate Slack alerts from a deadline Zap usually come down to one field

A team sets up a Zap that posts upcoming lien deadlines to a Slack channel. It works on day one. By day three the channel has the same project showing up four times, and people start muting it, which is the opposite of what the alert was for.

When the trigger is polling, the cause is usually the dedupe setting. Zapier decides whether a record is new by looking at one field. If that field is the project ID, every deadline on the same project looks like the same record, or every poll looks like a new one, depending on how the data changes. In LienDeadline's Zapier app, the Upcoming Deadline and Deadline Reminder triggers both return a stable id per record, and that's the field to dedupe on, not project_id.

A few other things that tend to look like bugs during setup:

• "No records found" on the trigger test usually means there are no projects with deadlines inside the days_ahead window yet.
• invalid_grant means the authorization code or refresh token is stale or was reused. Reconnect the account.
• Nothing fires right away. Polling frequency depends on your Zapier plan, so the first run can lag.

It also helps to start from a template rather than a blank Zap: invoice event to a new deadline project, upcoming deadline to Slack or Teams, reminder to email or SMS, or upcoming deadline to a Google Sheets or Airtable row.

The full runbook with the endpoints and a QA checklist is LienDeadline's Zapier setup and troubleshooting guide.

From the LienDeadline team. General information, not legal advice; have a qualified reviewer check the facts on any live job.