Tune Alerts and Reminders
These settings decide when the board speaks up about a job and how loudly. They change what everyone on the floor sees — not what the plan says a job will take.
Who can do this: Location Managers, Org Admins and Account Owners.
Step check-in timing
Controls when a running job is asked whether it is on schedule.
Open Settings → Operations → Step Check-In Timing
Set Grace
Extra time allowed past the estimate, as a percentage of the job’s own estimate. Never less than ten minutes, however short the job.
Set Cap
The largest that grace is ever allowed to become, so a very long job is still checked on at a sensible point rather than several hours later.
Read the worked example
The screen shows the arithmetic with your own numbers as you change them — a 60-minute job at your percentage, and where the check would fall.
Save
How it works out:
| Job estimate | Grace 25% | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 20 min | 5 min → raised to the 10-min minimum | Checked at 30 min |
| 60 min | 15 min | Checked at 75 min |
| 8 hours | 120 min → reduced to a 90-min cap | Checked at 9h 30m |
Start generous — 25 to 30 per cent — and tighten after a month. A board that chases every job five minutes late gets ignored within a week, and then it catches nothing at all.
Alerts and reminders
Open Settings → Operations → Alerts & Reminders
Set Countdown emphasis
A percentage of the estimate. The time-left figure on a card starts standing out over the last slice of a job.
At 20%, a 60-minute job stands out with 12 minutes left, and an eight-hour job with 96 — so a long job is not shouted about all afternoon.
Set the Paused-job reminder
How long a paused job may sit without an update before the board asks Still on hold?
Cannot be under ten minutes. Most shops use thirty to sixty.
Set the Not-started alert
How late a job may be past its planned start before the board flags it as Not Started.
Zero flags it the moment it is late. Ten to twenty minutes suits most shops, allowing for the walk from the office to the bay.
Save
Choosing values for your shop
| Your work | Grace | Cap | Not-started |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rapid / express — short jobs, high turnover | 30% | 20–30 min | 5–10 min |
| Mechanical — mixed durations | 25% | 60 min | 15 min |
| Diagnostics — genuinely unpredictable | 40% | 90 min | 20 min |
| Body and paint — long stages | 20% | 90 min | 30 min |
Diagnostic work deserves the most generous grace: a fault-finding job that takes twice its estimate is normal, and chasing it at 25 per cent teaches the technician that the prompt is noise.
Signs your settings are wrong
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| The floor ignores check-in prompts | Grace too tight — they are being asked about jobs that are fine |
| Delays are discovered at 5pm | Grace or cap too loose — nothing is asked in time to matter |
| Everything is flagged not-started every morning | Not-started alert too aggressive, or people are starting work before pressing Start |
| Paused jobs sit for hours untouched | Paused-job reminder too long |
| Cards are shouting all afternoon | Countdown emphasis too high |
Common questions
Do these change the plan? No. They change when the board speaks, not what a job is expected to take. To change how long work takes in the plan, change the service durations.
→ Build your service catalogue
Can I set different values per zone? These are set for the location. If your zones need very different treatment, tune to the majority of your work and accept that the outliers are chased slightly early or late.
Why can the paused-job reminder not be under ten minutes? Below that it would ask again before the board has meaningfully moved on, which produces a prompt nobody can answer usefully.
Who sees the difference? Everybody on the floor. Tell your team when you change these — an unannounced change to how often the board asks questions reads as the software behaving oddly.