How to choose who gets an alert and how often

Seven alerts on Brain › Automations let you choose who hears from them: Late purchase orders, Daily analyst brief, Low stock, Shipping backlog, Big orders, Store data stopped updating and Overdue supplier bills. What each one watches is covered in How to set up the stock and order alerts, and the page itself in What are automations?.

Two alerts have no choice. Under Who gets it, Task due reminders reads Each task's assignee. and Purchase order results reads Whoever set the target.

Before you start

Changing these controls needs the Manage automations permission, which admins hold by default. See How to set who can do what.

Who can receive an alert?

Everyone holding See sales, inventory, reports and the daily brief on Settings › Permissions, held by leads and admins by default, so members are not on the list unless you give them that permission. An alert's panel calls this group Mission Control.

To put someone on the list, give them that permission or a role that holds it, per How to add people and set roles. Their name then appears in each alert's panel.

How do you choose recipients?

Click the alert's row in the Alerts list to open its panel. Under Who gets it, pick one of two options. Each change saves as you make it, and a short Saved. message confirms it.

• Everyone with Mission Control is the default. The line under it reads, for example, 6 people now, and anyone given Mission Control access later.
• Only people I pick starts with everyone ticked, so switching to it takes nobody off. Click a name to untick it, and click it again to tick it back.

If you untick everyone, the panel warns No one is picked, so this reaches no one.

At Fairgreen Golf Co., Low stock goes to Priya Raman and Dana, who do the buying. Shipping backlog goes to Sam, who runs the warehouse.

How do you see who gets each alert?

Read the Who hears about it column in the Alerts list. It shows each panel's choice without opening it.

• Everyone with Mission Control: the default is in use.
• Priya Raman and Dana: only the people picked. With more than two, it names the first and counts the others.
• No one: a picked list with nobody on it.

When Also by email is on, the first two end with , by email too.

What happens when someone joins or loses access?

On Everyone with Mission Control, anyone who gains access later gets the alert automatically. On Only people I pick, they get it only after you tick their name.

Someone who loses access drops off either way and stops getting the alert. When a colleague says the alerts have stopped, check their permission first, per How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

What does Also by email do?

The panel's How they get it section shows In Tideswell as Always, and an Also by email switch. Turning the switch on sends each recipient an email copy as well as the item in their Work › Inbox.

The switch's note reads To each person's sign-in address. On the Daily analyst brief it reads At 8am in each person's own time zone.

Turn it on for the alerts somebody acts on away from Tideswell, and leave it off for the rest. An email that fails never stops the Inbox item, and the Latest column shows how many went, per How to check whether an automation worked.

What numbers can you set?

Two alerts have a number that decides when they speak up. Type the number, then leave the box or press Enter to save it.

• Shipping backlog, under When it alerts: the box At this many paid orders waiting to ship. It starts at 10.
• Big orders, under Orders over: the box Amount, in USD, which shows your store's own currency code. It starts at 1,000.

Low stock speaks when a product's shippable stock reaches 5 or fewer. Choosing the two numbers well is covered in How to set up the stock and order alerts.

How do you stop an alert repeating?

Pick a gap under Wait between alerts in the alert's panel. The choices are No wait, 1 hour, 4 hours, 12 hours, 1 day and 2 days. Every alert with Who gets it has this setting except the Daily analyst brief, which goes out once a day.

The note under it reads After an alert goes out, new ones wait this long, then go out together. Anything found during the wait is held, not dropped. If it is still there when the wait ends, it goes out on the next run.

Reach for this when an alert is noisy but still worth having. A backlog hovering around its number all afternoon is the usual case.

Where do alerts arrive?

In each recipient's Work › Inbox, as one item per run. Several finds in one run arrive together, such as 3 products low on stock.

Each recipient also gets a push notification, which follows their own settings under User menu › Account settings › What buzzes you:

• Low stock follows the Low-stock alerts toggle.
• Big orders, Late purchase orders and Overdue supplier bills follow the Notable order alerts toggle. The iPhone app calls it Order alerts.
• Shipping backlog and Store data stopped updating have no toggle of their own.

Quiet hours apply to every one of them. See How to control task, stock and order alerts and How to set quiet hours and your default chat level.

Can somebody silence one just for themselves?

Yes. Each person can switch off the phone alert with the toggles above, and the Inbox item still arrives. That is usually better than turning the automation off for everybody.

To take someone off an alert entirely, switch its panel to Only people I pick and click their name to untick it.