Home

Clay Announcements
Clay Support
Discuss Anything
Feedback & Requests
GTM Career Advice
Introduce Yourself
Member Spotlight
Share Content and Events
Share Full-time Jobs
Share Part Time Jobs
Share Tables, Tools, and Workflows

Community Guidelines

Explore Events
Clay Cup

Powered by Tightknit

Accessing the Updated At System Field in Your Project | Clay

Accessing the Updated At System Field in Your Project

·Dec 30, 2025 01:54 PM·

Hey there! It seems that the “Updated at” system field isn’t exposed as a variable. Is there anyway to work around that or to set it so its possible?

7 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Mark L.
·
·
Hey there. That's expected. The “Updated At” system field in Clay is intentionally not exposed as a variable for use in formulas, integrations, or as a reference in other columns. This helps prevent infinite update loops, which could occur if referencing “Updated At” triggered further updates, which would loop over and over again forever.
Mark L.
·
·
As a workaround, you can:
Create a formula column that generates a static timestamp when a specific field (like an ID) is present or when a particular action occurs. This avoids the infinite loop risk and allows you to track updates in a more controlled way.
Use external APIs (such as World Time API) or formula functions to capture the current date/time at specific workflow points .
This approach enables you to push a non-dynamic date value to external platforms or use it internally, without relying on the protected “Updated At” field.
Gabe C.
·
·
Ahh, that makes sense! Though, maybe I was hoping it would work because we’re using a bit of a pretty cool “hack” on Clay to skip the need to use n8n or even zapier 😄 And part of that requires us to send a timestamp at the point it runs and it re-uses the same row. So if we created a formula that uses javascript to get the timestamp, it doesn’t work since Clay doesn’t re-run the formula 😞
Gabe C.
·
·
Thanks Mark L. I’ll try using a world time API instead!
Mark L.
·
·
Okay, please keep in touch as new items come up!
🙏1
Clay Support
APP
·
·
Hey there - just wanted to check in here to see if you needed anything else. Feel free to reply here if you do and someone will jump in to help out
Clay Support
APP
·
·
We haven't heard back from you in a bit, so we're going to close things out here.

If you need anything else, feel free to reply back here and someone will jump in to help out!