--- title: Welcome to Recurring Form Submissions description: "**Recurring Form Submissions for Gravity Forms** turns a single form entry into a schedule. Submit the form once, and the plugin keeps creating new entries for you — every day, every other week, on the first of the month, until…" url: "https://brightleafdigital.io/docs/welcome-overview/" updated: "2026-10-18" category: Recurring Form Submissions for Gravity Forms / Getting Started --- # Welcome to Recurring Form Submissions **Recurring Form Submissions for Gravity Forms** turns a single form entry into a schedule. Submit the form once, and the plugin keeps creating new entries for you — every day, every other week, on the first of the month, until a date you choose or a number of submissions you set. Nothing is exported, nothing runs outside WordPress, and every submission goes through Gravity Forms exactly as if a person had pressed Submit. --- ## What It Does - **Repeats a form entry on a calendar schedule** — days, weeks, months or years. - **Runs at a time you choose**, in a timezone you choose, on the weekdays you allow. - **Stops when you say so** — after N successful submissions, on an end date, or based on a number field on the form. - **Keeps values current, or freezes them** — reuse the values saved today, or pull fresh values (including GP Populate Anything lookups) on every run. - **Shows you exactly what will happen next**, before it happens, with a preview of the next five occurrences. - **Tells you when something breaks** — email alerts, a dashboard notice and a full attempt history. --- ## Who It's For - **Nonprofits and membership organizations** collecting the same information on a rhythm. - **Operations teams** creating recurring tasks, checklists or status updates from a form. - **Schools and clinics** generating periodic records without re-keying them. - **Agencies** who need a repeat submission to behave like a real submission — notifications, feeds, workflows and all. If you can set up a Gravity Forms feed, you can set up a recurring schedule. --- ## The Vocabulary in One Table These five words appear everywhere in this documentation and in the plugin's screens. | Term | What it means | | --- | --- | | **Parent entry** | The entry a person submitted. It is the template and the anchor for the schedule. | | **Feed** | Your configuration: how often to repeat, when to stop, which values to use. | | **Series** | One running schedule — one parent entry paired with one feed. | | **Child entry** | A new entry the plugin created on schedule. | | **Attempt** | One run of the schedule, successful or not, recorded with its timing and outcome. | A parent entry can run **several series at once** if the form has several active recurring feeds. --- ## How It Works 1. **You create a feed** on a form: how often, what time, which timezone, when to stop. 2. **Someone submits the form.** If the feed's conditional logic passes, a series starts for that entry. 3. **The plugin calculates one next target** — a specific date, time and timezone. 4. **A background worker checks every 15 minutes** for targets that are due. 5. **When one is due, it submits the form again**, creating a child entry with your chosen values. 6. **The result is recorded** — success or failure, the child entry ID, and how late the run was. 7. **The next target is calculated**, and the cycle repeats until the series ends. > **Important:** a series only ever holds **one** next target — never a backlog. If your site is down for a week, you get one submission on recovery (or none, if you tell the feed to skip), never seven. --- ## What Makes It Reliable - **Nothing runs silently.** Every attempt writes a record and a note on the parent entry. - **Failures are bounded.** After three consecutive failures (by default) the series stops automatically instead of retrying forever. - **Lateness is explained.** Each attempt records whether it started inside the normal polling window, waited on a delayed cron dispatch, or ran manually. - **Nothing changes behind your back.** Editing a feed sets defaults for *new* series; existing schedules only change when you explicitly apply the change or edit them. - **You can always see the worker.** Queue reports whether WordPress actually ran the background check — not just whether it was scheduled. --- ## What You'll Find in This Documentation | Section | What's in it | | --- | --- | | **Getting Started** | Orientation — where everything lives, the vocabulary, and what your site needs before you rely on a schedule. | | **Setup** | Step-by-step: your first feed, choosing how values are filled in, and confirming the worker really runs. | | **Settings Reference** | Every screen and every setting, field by field. | | **How-To Guides** | Short task recipes — move one date, change many schedules, pause for a holiday, put controls on a front-end page. | | **Explanations & Concepts** | The reasoning: calendar math, DST, missed runs, lifecycle states, retention and permissions. | | **Troubleshooting** | Symptom-first pages — nothing runs, runs are late, a submission failed, values look wrong. | | **Developer Reference** | Actions, filters and their parameters. | | **Changelog / Roadmap** | What shipped, and what's being considered next. | --- ## Where to Go Next - New to the plugin? Read **Finding the Plugin in Your Dashboard**, then **Creating Your First Recurring Feed**. - Already have feeds running? **The Queue Screen** is where day-to-day operations happen. - Something isn't submitting? Start at **Troubleshooting Basics**.