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 (opens in 1pm in a new tab). 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. The summary arrives around that time.
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 is always "1pm weekly summary: outstanding requests", so it is easy to find in your inbox or to filter. The email opens with the total, for example "3 items are waiting on you.", which is also the line most phones show in the notification preview.

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

Needs review. Files that have arrived and that nobody has approved or rejected. Nobody can finish while a file waits on your decision, so this one is usually the section to work first. Each name is a link that opens that file beside Approve and Reject.
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.

Sample data is left out. Sample events and their uploads never appear in the summary, so an account with nothing but sample data gets no summary at all. The Requests page still shows sample rows until you remove them.

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 onboarding chases and alerts 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 (opens in 1pm in a new tab) 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 account email is confirmed. The summary only sends for an account whose email address has been confirmed.
Check the Emails log. Each summary appears in Checking what emails went out as Weekly summary, including one that bounced or was blocked before it left. A summary refused because of the address is not retried that day.

The summary does not use your monthly email allowance.

It sends at most once per day, so a deploy or a retry in the middle of your morning cannot produce two copies. If a send fails for a temporary reason, it tries again 15 minutes later, the same day.

The Requests dashboard is the screen the summary counts, and where its link takes you.
Automations covers the per-thing chases that run alongside it.
Automating crew onboarding covers wiring those chases into a sequence.
Chasing expiring documents covers working the expiry list by hand.
Your monthly email allowance covers what happens when the allowance runs out.
Checking what emails went out covers the log of every message your account sent.