Why greetings turn into a chore
In a small team, people remember birthdays on their own. Once you pass twenty employees, greetings usually land on HR or the office manager. They keep a spreadsheet of dates, collect wishes in direct messages ahead of time, write the text and post it in the company chat.
It all depends on one person and their memory. A new hire never makes it into the spreadsheet, and someone who left never gets removed. If the person in charge is on vacation, the greeting doesn't go out at all.
What to congratulate people on
- Birthdays. The most common occasion. Skip the age in the greeting, the day and month are enough.
- Work anniversaries. One, three, five years at the company. A greeting like this shows that people notice someone's contribution, and it's rarely done by hand because nobody remembers start dates.
- A new hire's first day. A welcome in the company channel with their name, role and team. Everyone gets to know the new person right away, and it's easier for them to start messaging colleagues.
- Company-wide holidays. New Year's, International Women's Day, professional holidays. You congratulate everyone at once here, so one message or a broadcast is enough. How to send a greeting to every employee personally is covered in the article "New Year's Greetings Bot".
- Personal milestones. A wedding, a new baby. Congratulate people on these only if they shared the news themselves and don't mind.
Where to keep the dates
A spreadsheet owned by HR. Someone has to update it by hand every time a person joins or leaves, and it doesn't remind you of anything.
A calendar. It reminds you ahead of time, but only one person, and the greeting still has to be written by hand.
The employee profile in Pachca. An administrator adds a field of the "Date" type to the member card, for example "Birthday." Dates are filled in when an employee is added or passed from a corporate directory. A bot reads them through the API, so there's no separate spreadsheet to keep.
How to congratulate people in Pachca
A recurring scheduled message. The simplest option, no bot needed. Write the greeting in the company channel, open the send settings, choose "Schedule message," set the date and time and turn on the "Yearly" repeat. The message will go out on that day every year. This works for a small team: a single chat can hold up to 50 scheduled messages, and you need to create a separate message for each new hire. More in the Help Center article on scheduled messages.
A bot that reads dates from profiles. Every morning, the bot's handler reads employee profiles and checks the dates. If someone has a birthday or anniversary tomorrow, the bot messages their manager and teammates directly and offers to add a wish through a form. In the morning, it posts the greeting in the company channel along with the collected wishes and attaches a card on its own: it picks one from a ready-made set or generates one with an AI model. New hires are included automatically as soon as their profile has a date.
A broadcast for a company-wide holiday. The bot sends one greeting to the company channel or to each employee personally through the "Create message" API method.
How to set up greetings through a bot in Pachca
1. Add date fields. In "Members," click "Settings," then "Add field," choose the "Date" type and name the field, for example "Birthday." Add "Start date" the same way and click "Save." Fill in the fields in employee profiles.
2. Pick a channel for greetings. The company-wide channel with every employee works well. How to name chats and channels is covered in the article "How to organize communication in your team chat app".
3. Create a bot. In "Integrations," choose "Bots," click "Create bot," give it a name like "Celebrations" and add it to the channel.
4. Set up the reminder with a form. A bot in Pachca posts messages with buttons, and a button click opens a form with a text field for the wish. More in the Help Center articles on buttons and forms.
5. Connect a handler. The bot doesn't check dates itself. Every morning, a handler program does it: it gets employees with their custom fields through the "List employees" API method, sends reminders, saves wishes from the form, picks a card and posts the greeting. It's built without code in n8n, written with an AI coding assistant, or handed to a developer. How a handler receives a form is covered in the scenario "How do you approve time off without paper forms?", and how to build a bot without a programmer, in the scenario "How do you build an AI agent without code?".
Rules for greetings
Pin the rules in the company channel so new hires know how greetings work.
- Ask whether people want a public greeting. Not everyone likes the attention. Add a "Congratulate publicly" field to the profile, or simply leave the date empty for people who'd rather skip it.
- Leave out the age. The day and month of birth are enough for the profile, the year is optional.
- Congratulate in one channel. If greetings go out sometimes in the company channel and sometimes in team chats, someone will get missed.
- Keep gift collections separate and voluntary. Don't mix them into the greeting in the company channel. If you're collecting, post in a separate chat without the person celebrating and don't nudge people who didn't reply.
Frequently asked questions
Leave their date field empty, or add a "Congratulate publicly" field to the profile and check it in the bot's handler. The bot will skip that employee, and nobody will wonder why there was no greeting.
Yes. The bot posts the greeting on the handler's schedule, for example at 10 a.m. head office time. If your team is distributed, pick a time when the workday has already started for most employees.