How Scout thinks: points, evidence, and the morning brief
Scout has one unit of work, and everything else is built on it. This article explains what a point is, where points come from, why every point carries its proof, and how the morning brief decides what to put in front of you.
A point is one item with proof behind it
A point is one thing Scout raises for you to understand or act on: chase this invoice, this purchase order was never acknowledged, this quote is about to go stale, this customer reorders in September. A point is never a score or a rating — it is an item on a list.
Every point cites evidence: the rows underneath it that say where it came from. Each evidence row is labeled with its source, so you can tell at a glance whether Scout is reading a mail thread, a record in your accounting system, a fact it learned about an account, or a calculation it ran. In the Inbox the evidence sits under the heading The work — where this came from.
Screenshot: a point with its evidence rows. Every point has at least one.
A point with no evidence does not exist in Scout, even for a moment. That rule is what makes the Inbox checkable: you never have to take Scout's word for anything.
The four kinds of point
| Kind | What it is | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Recommendation | Something to do — follow up, chase a payment, quote a reorder, confirm a ship date. | Filter chip Needs you |
| Observation | Something worth knowing that asks nothing of you — a payment posted, a pattern Scout spotted. | Filter chip Worth knowing |
| Notice | Housekeeping, almost always a connection that needs an administrator's attention. | Filter chip Notices |
| Identity match | A proposal that two records are the same customer or contact. You choose Confirm or Keep separate. | Identity review, under Housekeeping |
Recommendations and observations are the two you will see most. Identity matches are the one kind Scout will never decide for you: it proposes, and a person confirms. See Identity matches: Confirm or Keep separate.
Where points come from: Watches over your connected sources
Points are not generated at random and they are not written by hand. Each one is produced by a Watch — one operational question Scout asks of your data, over and over. There are eighteen Watches in the catalogue, grouped into five categories: Financial, Follow-ups, Supplier Integration, Pattern Recognition, and Support. Each Watch targets one kind of value: money collected, cost avoided, or margin protected.
Two things follow from Watches being Scout's rather than yours:
- You tune them, you do not author them. An Owner or Admin can enable or disable a Watch and adjust its thresholds — how many business days a supplier gets to acknowledge a purchase order, for example. You cannot write a new Watch, and you do not have to.
- A Watch needs its sources. A Watch that reads supplier order status cannot fire until a supplier feed is connected. Until then it sits quiet rather than guessing.
The full list, with one page per Watch, is in What Watches are. Tuning is in Configuring Watches.
Due dates, and why Scout leaves some blank
A point gets a due date only when evidence supports one — a supplier's stated art-lock date, an invoice term, a cutoff someone wrote in a thread. Scout will not infer a date from when it happened to notice something. Work with no supported date lands in a section for undated items and stays visible there. See Due dates and undated items.
How the morning brief picks its five
Every member gets their own morning brief: one email, built from exactly what that person can see in their own Inbox. Nothing appears in your brief that you could not open in the app.
The brief carries, in order: a greeting and one-line read of the day, up to five points above the line, a coverage figure, and the count of items that lapsed in the last seven days. "Above the line" is a deliberate bar — the point has to put dollars at risk, save dollars, or protect goodwill before tomorrow. Scout would rather send you three items you act on than fifteen you skim.
Coverage is the share of your granted sources Scout could actually read when it built the brief. When coverage is low the brief says so and marks itself partial, and recommendations that depend on the missing source are withheld rather than sent with a hole in them.
Screenshot: a morning brief.
By default the brief arrives on weekdays at 6:30 in your workspace's time zone. You can change the time, the days, or turn it off entirely. See The morning brief.
Good to know
- Scout does not repeat itself. Once you have been told about a point, the brief will not raise it again unless something meaningful about it changes.
- Most points settle themselves. When the reply lands or the invoice clears, Scout closes the item, writes a receipt saying why, and tells the people working it so the work is not done twice.
- Your feedback on a point — Useful, Not useful, Wrong — is how Scout's accuracy gets measured, and it shows up as the precision figure on Found. See Rating a point.
- Dollar figures in Scout come from calculations over your own records, and each one traces back to a receipt in Found.