How to Use the Greeting Card Planner and Calendar

Plan the occasion before you plan the card

The Card Planner combines personal reminders, scheduled card deliveries and a selected calendar of public holidays or celebrations. It is useful for recurring workplace occasions because the event date, the organiser reminder and the card send date can be seen together without forcing them to be the same day.

Use the planner as the source of truth for when preparation starts. The card remains the source of truth for recipient details and delivery time. A reminder might tell you to begin a farewell card ten days early, while the green scheduled-card entry shows when the finished card will actually be sent.

Choose the right view and event list

Calendar view shows a full year with controls for moving between years. Select a day to see its reminders, observances and scheduled cards. Upcoming view focuses on the next 90 days, which is better for weekly planning and prioritising cards that need action now.

The Event List menu includes country calendars as well as Office and Quirky & Fun lists. Your selection is remembered. On a first visit, Happy Tree Cards attempts to select a supported country from your location; you can change it at any time. Observances are read-only reference entries. They do not create cards or email notifications automatically.

Create a reminder that leads to action

Select the relevant day and choose Add Reminder. Give it a specific title such as “Start Priya’s leaving card” rather than only “Priya”. Use the description for the owner, intended signing group, delivery expectations or a link to an internal people calendar. You can add up to 100 reminders to an account.

Choose an Email Notification lead time if you want an email before the selected day, or leave notifications off for a visual-only reminder. Reminder emails are scheduled around the service configured daily send time, so use the lead time as a planning boundary rather than relying on an exact local-minute alarm.

Use repeating reminders for genuine recurrence

Reminders can be one-off, weekly, every two, three or four weeks, monthly, every three months or yearly. Yearly works well for birthdays and work anniversaries. Monthly repetition is useful for a regular recognition programme. Repeating dates at the end of a month are adjusted to the last valid day in shorter months, and yearly leap-day reminders are handled safely.

Do not make every event repeat by default. A leaving date, one-off launch or fixed retirement should remain one-off. Review repeating reminders when an employee changes team or leaves; otherwise an outdated reminder can continue generating emails long after it is useful.

Understand scheduled card entries

Cards with a delivery date appear automatically in the planner. Select the date to see the cover thumbnail, recipient and current delivery status, then use View Card for a quick check. These entries are linked to the card, not duplicated reminders. Change the delivery date from the card Admin flow rather than trying to edit the green card entry in the planner.

A useful workflow has two dates: a reminder to create or circulate the card, and a scheduled delivery entry for the recipient occasion. Leave a review gap between them. For a large group, add another reminder for the signing deadline rather than moving the recipient delivery date every time contributions are late.

Maintain many reminders with CSV

The calendar toolbar can download reminders as CSV and upload a CSV to create or update them. A downloaded file contains the reminder identifier, date, title, description, notification lead time and repeat frequency. Starting with a download is the safest way to preserve the expected columns and existing identifiers.

An upload opens a preview of planned creates, updates and replacements before anything is applied. The option to delete reminders missing from the CSV is off by default. Leave it off for an additive update. Turn it on only when the CSV is intended to be a complete, authoritative replacement, and inspect every proposed deletion in the preview.

Adopt a practical planning cadence

At the start of each month, scan Upcoming view and assign organisers. Each week, check reminders due in the next fortnight and verify that scheduled cards have enough signatures. After a card is delivered, remove one-off process reminders that are no longer useful. Quarterly, review repeating reminders, the selected event list and the CSV export for stale records.

The planner works best when it answers three different questions clearly: what occasions are coming, when should work begin, and when will each finished card be delivered. Keep those distinctions intact and it becomes a dependable operating calendar rather than another list of dates.