Can Scout email my customers or place orders?

No. Scout prepares — you send.

What Scout does instead

Where a message would help, Scout writes you a draft and shows it on the item under Draft — prepared by Scout, with the reasoning and evidence beside it. You get a Copy draft button and a link that opens the original thread in your own mail program. You read it, change what you want, and send it yourself — from your mailbox, in your name, in your voice.

The same is true of orders. Scout reads your purchase orders and your suppliers' responses to them so it can tell you when one was never acknowledged or when a ship date slipped. It does not place, change, cancel, or acknowledge a purchase order. Purchase orders are read-only in Scout.

What Scout does send

Only to people inside your workspace, and always clearly from Scout: your morning brief, item update notifications by email, and direct messages in Slack if you have linked your account. Nothing addressed to an outside party leaves Scout.

Why it is built this way

Two reasons. The first is trust: a message to a customer carries your shop's relationship with them, and that is not something software should spend on your behalf. The second is honesty about what Scout knows — Scout reads your systems well, but it does not know what you agreed on the phone yesterday.

Automatic sending to your customers is not a hidden setting waiting to be found. The option that would enable it is refused by Scout's own database, not merely left out of the interface. Order-status updates sent to your customers on your behalf are not available today.

See Scout reads, it never writes for exactly what each connection can and cannot do.