---
title: Setting timeouts for automation process steps
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/marketing-automation/working-with-the-automation-process-designer/adding-wait-steps-to-automation-processes.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

> **Info:** **Enterprise license required**
>
> Features described on this page require the **Kentico Xperience Enterprise** license.

You can set timeouts to ensure that automation processes do not indefinitely stay in steps that require a [human decision](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/marketing-automation/working-with-the-automation-process-designer/defining-manual-choice-steps-in-automation-processes.md). If nobody moves a contact within a process to another step before the timeout expires, the system advances the contact automatically. The following types of steps support timeouts:

- [Approve progress](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/marketing-automation/working-with-the-automation-process-designer/defining-manual-choice-steps-in-automation-processes.md)
- [Manual choice](https://docs.kentico.com/13/on-line-marketing-features/managing-your-on-line-marketing-features/marketing-automation/working-with-the-automation-process-designer/defining-manual-choice-steps-in-automation-processes.md)

To add a timeout limit for a step:

1. Edit the step by clicking it in the designer grid.

   - The designer opens a panel showing the details of the given step's configuration.
2. Switch to the **Advanced** tab.
3. Under **Timeout settings**, specify when you want the process to move to the next step:

   - **Specific interval** – set the length of the timeout interval. The time starts running when a contact moves into the step. Every instance of the process has a separate timeout counter.
   - **Specific day** – set the exact date (and optionally time) when you want the process to move into the next step. Applies to all instances of the process.
4. Choose to which step the process continues if the timeout expires via the **Leave through** selector.
   - You can select to have a separate timeout source point.
5. Click **Apply**.
6. If you selected a separate timeout source point as the **Leave through** option, connect the new source point to another step in the process designer.

![Approval step with a timeout source point](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/13/setting-timeouts-for-automation-process-steps/Approval_step_timeout.png "Approval step with a timeout source point")