How to turn an automation on, off, or run it now

Every automation card carries its own switch, and turning one on or off changes nothing about the others. See How to see what runs in the background for what each job does.

Before you start

Configuring automations is an admin job by default. Without that permission you land on the Workflows page instead, or are told automation management access is required.

How do you switch one on?

The toggle in the card's top-right corner. It saves instantly and confirms with a short "Automation updated" message.

Most alerting automations ship switched off, which is deliberate: a new workspace with every watchdog firing would teach everybody to ignore them in the first week.

Turn them on one at a time as you decide you want them, rather than all at once.

Which should you turn on first?

Low stock alerts, if you carry stock. It is the one whose absence costs real money, and it is quiet by nature because each product alerts once and re-arms only after it recovers.

Then Fulfillment backlog alerts with a threshold set to a number that would genuinely worry you, per How to set up the stock and order alerts.

Leave Daily analyst brief until you have somebody who will read it each morning. A briefing nobody opens is worse than none.

What does Run now do?

Makes that job due immediately instead of waiting for its next scheduled turn.

It goes through the same queue as the schedule rather than around it, which means it can never double-fire. It also triggers the whole scheduler tick, so other jobs that were already due may run at the same moment.

Use it after switching something on, so you find out now whether it works rather than tomorrow.

What happens when you turn one off?

It stops running. Nothing else changes: its settings, its recipients and its history are all kept, so turning it back on resumes where you left off.

Switching an automation off is the right move when an alert is genuinely not useful to your business. When the problem is that it fires too often, the re-alert window is the better control, per How to choose who gets an alert and how often.

And when the problem is that it buzzes you rather than that it is wrong, that is a personal setting rather than a workspace one. See What are notifications?.

Why did nothing happen after I switched it on?

Three possibilities, in the order worth checking.

Automations are off for the whole environment, shown as an amber banner across the top of the page. Nothing runs until that changes, whatever the cards say.

The job has not come round yet. Each has its own cadence. Press Run now rather than waiting.

There was nothing to report. A watchdog with nothing to say records "no alert", which is a healthy run. See How to check whether an automation worked.

Why can I not add my own automation?

Because the list is fixed by the product: these are the jobs Tideswell ships and maintains.

Building your own rule is what workflows are for, and they can do considerably more than an alert. See How to build your first workflow.