Your first week with Scout

Scout is only as useful as the sources it can read, so the first week is mostly about connecting things and then letting Scout catch up on your history. Here is the order that works, what to expect at each stage, and what not to worry about.

Day one: connect one mailbox

Mail is where most of a promo shop's operational truth lives — proofs waiting on approval, ship dates promised in a thread, quotes that went quiet. Start there.

1. Open Connections.
2. Find your mail provider and start the connect flow. Gmail and Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365 and Outlook, are both supported.
3. Grant read-only access at the provider's own consent screen.
4. Leave it alone. Scout reads roughly a year of history in the background, a page at a time, and the connection card tells you when it last read successfully.

Full steps: Connecting Gmail, Connecting Microsoft 365 / Outlook. If your shop works out of a shared address such as a sales mailbox, the Microsoft article covers connecting a named shared mailbox, which routes its work to a team rather than to one person.

Day one or two: connect accounting

Mail tells Scout what was promised. Accounting tells it what was billed and paid, which is what turns "chase this" into "chase this, and here is the invoice."

1. Open Connections and start the QuickBooks Online connect flow.
2. Choose the company you want Scout to read.
3. Scout reads customers, estimates, invoices, bills, payments, and credit memos — about two years of history — and keeps deep links back into QuickBooks so you can open the original record.

See Connecting QuickBooks Online.

Day two or three: get your people in

1. Open Settings → Workspace → Teams and create the teams that match how you divide work — Sales and Production is a fine start.
2. Open Settings → Workspace → People & roles and invite everyone in one batch, choosing the role and primary team for that batch.
3. Ask each person to connect their own mailbox once they are in. Their own follow-ups will not appear until they do.

See Teams and Inviting people. Adding a second person changes how the Inbox behaves — see Working solo vs with a team.

Day three: set your brief, and tell everyone to set theirs

1. Open Settings → Workspace → Notifications.
2. In the morning brief group, choose Off, Weekdays, or Daily. Weekdays is the default.
3. Pick a send time. There are nine fixed slots, every half hour from 6:00 to 10:00. The default is 6:30.
4. Decide whether you want the brief only when there is work, or every scheduled day regardless.
5. Choose Save changes. Each group on this page saves on its own.

Owners and Admins also set the workspace default here, which is what a new person inherits until they change it. See The morning brief and Item update notifications.

Day four: look at Watches once

You do not have to change anything here, and the defaults are reasonable. But reading the list once tells you what Scout is actually looking for, which makes the first points make sense.

1. Open Settings → Workspace → Watches.
2. Read the list. Eighteen Watches sit in five categories — Financial, Follow-ups, Supplier Integration, Pattern Recognition, and Support.
3. Check three thresholds against how your shop actually works: how many business days a supplier gets to acknowledge a purchase order (the default is two), how long a follow-up waits before Scout reminds you (one, two, or three business days), and whether you want a margin floor on open quotes (off by default).
4. Choose Save changes if you changed anything. Only an Owner or Admin can write here; everyone else sees the same page read-only.

See Configuring Watches.

Day four or five: connect your suppliers

Supplier order feeds are what turn "I think that purchase order was never acknowledged" into a dated fact. Some suppliers can be read on a shared feed straight away; others need credentials issued in your shop's name, which Scout can request on your behalf.

Start with Connecting your suppliers: overview.

All week: let the Inbox fill in, and tell Scout when it is wrong

Points do not all arrive at once. Scout reads history first, then starts noticing change, and it publishes new points on a regular cycle rather than the instant something happens. An empty Inbox in hour one is expected; a quiet Inbox on day three with a connected mailbox is worth asking about.

As points appear, use the three verdicts — Useful, Not useful, Wrong. They are not a satisfaction survey. Marking something wrong retires that line of reasoning for that account, and the tally becomes the precision figure on Found. Dismissals teach Scout too, which is why a dismissal asks for a note and a handled item does not.

End of week one: read Found

Open Found and look at the receipts rather than the totals. Each line names what Scout caught, what happened next, and the record that proves it. That is the honest measure of whether Scout is earning its place in your week.

Good to know

• Nothing you connect changes anything upstream. Every connection is read-only, and Scout never sends on your behalf.
• If a card shows a warning, it usually means a grant expired rather than something broken. See A connection shows Warning or Error.
• Your plan includes an allowance of mailboxes, connections, and supplier feeds; your plan's allowance shows on the Plan page. When you connect more mailboxes than your allowance covers, a processing priority order decides which ones Scout reads in full. See Mailbox processing priority.
• There is no data entry in Scout, and no import to prepare. If you find yourself typing your book of business into Scout, stop — that is not how it works.