What are automations?

An automation is a background job that Tideswell ships with. It watches something and tells you when it matters: stock running out, orders piling up, a large order arriving, your data going stale.

You configure them rather than build them. Automations in the sidebar opens with two pages under it, Automations and Workflows.

Why does this exist?

Because the alternative is somebody remembering to look.

Fairgreen Golf Co. checked stock every Monday. Anything that ran out on a Tuesday was out for six days before anybody noticed, and the first sign was usually a customer.

An automation closes that gap. The low-stock watchdog checks continuously and puts an item in the right people's Inbox the moment something drops, whether or not anybody opened a screen.

What is the difference from a workflow?

An automation is built by Tideswell. It is a fixed list, and what you control is whether it runs, who it tells, and how often it is allowed to speak.

A workflow is built by you. You choose a trigger, add conditions, and pick what happens. See What are workflows?.

Use an automation for the things every brand needs watched. Use a workflow for the rules that are yours alone, like "when a repair record is marked urgent, create a task for the warehouse lead".

What do the automations cover?

Three sorts of job.

Watchdogs that alert you: low stock, the fulfilment backlog, notable orders, and store data going stale. See How to set up the stock and order alerts.

Written work: the daily analyst brief, and task due reminders. See How to switch on and read the daily brief.

Quiet upkeep that keeps the rest of Tideswell fresh, such as syncing customers, watching Shopify for changes, refreshing dashboards and recalculating fields. Those need no configuration and are covered in How to see what runs in the background.

What can you actually change?

Four things per job, on the jobs that use them:

• On or off, individually.
• Who gets the alert, and whether it also goes by email.
• The threshold that decides when it speaks.
• How long it stays quiet after alerting, so a flapping figure does not buzz all day.

Plus Run now, which makes a job due immediately instead of waiting for its turn.

Where do the alerts land?

In the Inbox of everybody set to receive them, and on their phone if they have notifications on. Optionally by email as well.

Three separate switches decide whether a phone actually buzzes: the automation itself, the person's own toggle, and their quiet hours. That is the first thing to check when somebody says they are not being told, and it is covered in What are notifications?.

Who can configure them?

Managing automations is an admin job by default. Without it you are shown the Workflows page instead, or told that automation management access is required.

Receiving alerts is separate: the recipient list is drawn from everybody with store access.

Where to go next

How to see what runs in the background is the tour. How to turn an automation on, off, or run it now and How to choose who gets an alert and how often are the two jobs you will actually do.