Automating a report with Dust Triggers

A built-in mechanism, not a separate tool

Unlike Claude Code, where a "routine" is a distinct feature configured alongside the skill, Dust builds scheduling directly into the agent's definition: it's a Trigger. No new concept to learn — you simply add a scheduled trigger to an agent that already exists.

Dust offers two types of Triggers:

• Scheduled: described in natural language — "every weekday at 8:30am," "the first Friday of the month at 2pm."
• Webhook: triggered by an external event (GitHub, Jira, Zendesk...). The Spendesk MCP itself doesn't expose events like this — see the limitation below.

Every run stays a visible conversation

A nice difference from a plain background job: every scheduled run of a Dust agent creates a reviewable conversation, with the run time, the reasoning, and the result. Nothing is hidden in technical logs.

Setting up a Trigger

Add a Trigger to this agent: every weekday at 8:30am, run the overdue-invoice check (spendesk_get_due_invoices) and summarize invoices due within the next 3 days, sorted by amount descending.

Examples by frequency

Daily (AP Manager): today's payment priority list, based on spendesk_get_due_invoices.

Weekly (CFO): a 4-week cash flow forecast, based on spendesk_analyze_spend and scheduled payments.

Monthly (Controller): a close checklist (GL reconciliation, duplicate detection, un-exported invoices).

Monthly (Procurement): aging of unprocessed purchase requests.

The limitation that stays true regardless of platform

Even with Dust's webhook Triggers, the Spendesk MCP itself has no webhooks — Spendesk can't notify any agent, on any platform, that an event just happened. A scheduled Trigger is still a fixed-interval run that pulls data, not a true real-time alert. That's an MCP limitation, not a Dust one — it exists identically on the Claude Code side.

To broadcast a Trigger's result to your whole team: Native Slack alerts.