---
title: "Why aren\u2019t Birthday and Work Anniversary reminders sent to all Employees?"
space: "Frappe HR"
url: "https://docs.frappe.io/hr/organization-management/help-articles/why-are-birthday-and-work-anniversary-reminders-not-sent-to-everyone"
updated: "2026-10-25"
---

Frappe HR sends a birthday or work anniversary reminder only to **Active** employees of the same company who have an email address on their Employee record. Employees who do not meet these conditions do not get the email.

## Example

Bluepeak Technologies Pvt Ltd has ten active employees. Today is Arjun Reddy's birthday. The HR team sees that only seven people got the **Birthday Reminder** email:

- Rahul Menon and Pooja Nair did not get it. Their Employee records have no email address.
- Arjun Reddy did not get it. The reminder is about Arjun, so Arjun is not a recipient.
- Sneha Iyer did not get it. Sneha's status is **Left**.
- Employees of the other company on the site did not get it.

In this example, the system did what it is designed to do. Each person was left out for one of the reasons in the next section.

## How it works

The reminders are a daily scheduled job. The job runs one time each day and does these steps:

1. It finds the **Active** employees whose **Date of Birth** (or **Date of Joining**, for work anniversaries) has today's day and month. The year must be before the current year. Thus no one gets a work anniversary reminder on the day they join.
2. It groups these employees by **Company**.
3. For each company, it collects one email address for each **Active** employee of that company. It uses the first of these fields that has a value:
  1. **User ID**
  2. **Company Email**
  3. **Personal Email**
4. It removes the people who have the birthday or anniversary from the list of recipients.
5. It puts the email in the **Email Queue**. Each recipient gets a separate copy, with only their own address in the **To** field.

Thus an employee does not get the reminder in these cases:


| Reason                                                                                          | What to check                                                                                             |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| The Employee record has no **User ID**, **Company Email** or **Personal Email**                 | **Address & Contacts** and **Overview → User Details** tabs of the Employee                           |
| The employee **Status** is not **Active** (for example **Inactive**, **Suspended** or **Left**) | **Status** on the Employee                                                                                |
| The employee is in a different company from the person who has the birthday                     | **Company** on the Employee                                                                               |
| The employee is the person who has the birthday or anniversary                                  | Not a problem. If two or more people share the date, each of them gets a separate email about the others. |
| The email address is in **Email Unsubscribe**, or the email failed to send                      | **Email Queue** and **Email Unsubscribe** lists                                                           |


The **Preferred Contact Email** field on the Employee is not used for these reminders.

The job uses the data that is on the Employee record at the time it runs. If you change an employee's status to **Left** after the job ran, the reminder for that day was already sent.

Employees born on 29 February get a birthday reminder only in leap years.

## The reminder is not sent to anyone

If no one gets the reminder, check these items:

- **The reminder is turned off.** Go to **HR Settings → Employee → Reminders**. Make sure **Birthdays** and **Work Anniversaries** are selected.
  ![](/files/01-hr-settings-reminders.webp)
- **There is no outgoing email account.** If the **Sender** field in **HR Settings** is empty, the system uses the default outgoing Email Account. If there is no default outgoing account, the job stops with this error:
  ```
  Please setup default outgoing Email Account from Tools > Email Account
  ```

  Set up an Email Account with **Enable Outgoing** and **Default Outgoing** selected, or select an account in **Sender**.
- **The scheduler is disabled.** The reminders are a daily scheduled job. If the scheduler is disabled on your site, no reminders are sent.

## What you can do

### Find employees without an email address

1. Go to the **Employee** list.
2. Click **Filters**, then add these filters:
  - **Status** **Equals** **Active**
  - **Company** **Equals** your company
  - **User ID** **Is** **Not Set**
  - **Company Email** **Is** **Not Set**
  - **Personal Email** **Is** **Not Set**
  ![](/files/02-employee-filters.webp)
3. Click **Apply Filters**. The list shows the active employees who cannot get the reminder.  
![](/files/03-employees-without-email.webp)

### Add an email address to the employee

1. Open the Employee.
2. Go to the **Address & Contacts** tab.
3. Type the address in **Company Email** or **Personal Email**.  
![](/files/04-employee-email-fields.webp)
4. Click **Save**.

If the employee has a login, you can set **User ID** instead. It is on the **Overview** tab, in the **User Details** section. When **User ID** is set, the reminder goes to that address, even if **Company Email** also has a value.

![](/files/05-employee-user-id.webp)

### Check who the email was sent to

1. Go to the **Email Queue** list. You must have the **System Manager** role.
2. Open the email with the subject **Birthday Reminder** or **Work Anniversary Reminder**.
3. Look at the **Recipient** table. It shows every address the reminder was sent to, and the status for each one.

![](/files/06-email-queue-recipients.webp)

If the status is **Error** or the email stays in **Not Sent**, the problem is with the outgoing Email Account, not with the reminder.

Each recipient gets a separate copy. So if you compare the emails that two employees received, each shows a different address in **To**. This is correct. The **Recipient** table shows the full list.

## Related

- [HR Settings](https://docs.frappe.io/hr/hr-settings)
- [What happens to the user account when I change an employee's status?](https://docs.frappe.io/hr/organization-management/help-articles/what-happens-to-the-user-account-when-i-change-an-employees-status)