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The weekly summary email

account-and-billingrequeststips
The weekly summary email

The chases in 1pm all point outward. A reminder goes to the supplier who has not sent their certificate, another to the one whose insurance lapses next month, another to the one whose file you sent back. What none of them covers is the pile that is waiting on you: the uploads nobody has approved, the documents about to run out, the ones that already have.

The weekly summary is one email a week that says what that pile looks like. It is off until you turn it on, you pick the day and the hour, and it only arrives when there is actually something in it.

Switching it on

The settings live at /Account/Digest. There are four things to set:

  • Send me a weekly summary. Off by default. Nothing sends while this is unticked.
  • Day. Any day of the week. Monday morning suits most people, because the queue you are looking at is the week's work.
  • Time. Any hour, on the hour.
  • Send to. Leave it blank to use your own account email. Set an address if the person who works the queue is not the person who owns the account, for example a shared operations inbox.

Save, and that is it.

The hour is measured in your account time zone. If you have not set one, it falls back to UTC, which is almost certainly not what you want: 8am chosen in Brisbane would land at 6pm. The settings page says which clock it is using, and says plainly when no zone is set. Set your zone on Profile and the summary follows your own morning.

What is in it

The subject leads with the total, because that is the one thing worth seeing in a notification preview on a phone: "3 things need you on 1pm" is actionable from a lock screen, "Your weekly summary" is not.

The body has up to four counted sections, each naming a few real examples:

  • Waiting on your review. Files that have arrived and that nobody has approved or rejected. Nobody can finish while a file sits unreviewed, so this one is usually the section to work first.
  • Expiring in the next 30 days. Dated documents on record with a date still to come, each line carrying the date it expires.
  • Already expired. Counted separately from the section above, because a lapsed certificate is out of compliance now rather than heading that way. Each line carries the date it expired.
  • Rejected uploads. Files you sent back. A rejection stays here until you delete the rejected row, whether or not a replacement has arrived, which is what the Requests page shows too. Rejections older than a year drop off, so one nobody ever tidied up does not keep the summary arriving forever.

Under the sections, a link straight to your Requests page, and a line saying which schedule the email is on and where to change it.

Two rules govern how it is composed, and both exist so the email keeps being worth opening:

  • A section with nothing in it is left out entirely, rather than printed as a zero. Four headings each reading 0 is not a status report, it is noise.
  • An empty summary is not sent at all. A weekly email that is usually empty teaches people to filter it, and the filter takes the first real one with it.

Each section names up to five examples. When there are more, the list says "and N more" underneath, so five of twelve never reads as the whole story.

Where the numbers come from

The counts and the examples come from the same query that draws your Requests dashboard, so the email and the screen can never disagree. If the summary says four files are waiting on review, opening Requests shows you the same four.

The 30-day window on "expiring" is the same window the Requests page uses, for the same reason.

What it deliberately does not carry

A count of people who have not finished. It is the obvious thing to want, and it is missing on purpose: answering it across a whole account means a completion pass for every person on every event, which is a real amount of work for one line in an email. The Requests page answers it per event, on demand, when you actually need it.

Anything about leads, quotes, invoices or bookings. This is a documents-and-approvals digest, not a business summary. The reports cover the rest.

How it relates to the automations

They do different jobs, and most accounts want both.

The nine opt-in onboarding emails in Automations are per-thing and outward: one email about one document, to one person, at the moment it matters. Three of them do point at you (invite not opened, upload not reviewed, everyone has finished), and those are still the right tool when you want to know about a single event the moment it happens.

The weekly summary is composed and inward: several counted sections in one message, on your schedule, describing the whole queue at once. That shape is why it is a settings screen rather than another trigger. An automation trigger answers "this one thing needs attention" and merges its fields against that one thing; a digest has four sections and a total, which merge fields cannot express and a day-offset box cannot schedule.

A reasonable setup is both: Upload not reviewed at 2 days so a single stalled file pings you quickly, and the weekly summary on Monday at 8am so nothing accumulates unseen.

If it does not arrive

  • Check there was anything to send. An empty summary is not sent, so a quiet week is a quiet inbox. Open Requests and see whether the four sections would have had anything in them.
  • Check the day and hour, and the time zone. With no account time zone set, the hour is UTC.
  • Check the address. If you set one, that is where it went, not to your login email.
  • Check your allowance. A send refused because your monthly email allowance is spent is released rather than consumed, so it retries on the next pass rather than costing you the whole week. See Your monthly email allowance.
  • Check the Emails log. Checking what emails went out shows what actually left your account, including anything that bounced or was blocked before it left.

It sends at most once per day, so a deploy or a retry in the middle of your morning cannot produce two copies.

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