What is Scout HQ?

Scout HQ is an operational intelligence companion for promotional products distributors. You connect the tools your shop already runs — mailboxes, accounting, supplier feeds — and Scout reads them, builds one picture of your book of business out of what it finds, and each morning tells you what deserves your attention, with the proof attached.

The promise is small and specific: open Scout in the morning and know exactly what needs you today.

Screenshot: the Inbox, which is where you will spend most of your time in Scout.

Who Scout is for

Scout is built for promotional products distributors — the people who quote, sell, source, produce, and bill promotional product orders. That includes the owner who wants to know what slipped, the sales rep chasing a quote that went quiet, the production coordinator watching an in-hands date, and the bookkeeper looking for an invoice nobody billed.

Scout is a companion to the systems you already trust, not a replacement for any of them. Your mailbox is still your mailbox. Your accounting system is still the book of record for money. Your industry research tools are still where you search product. Scout sits on top and connects the dots between them.

The three things Scout does

1. It reads your tools. You connect a mailbox, your accounting system, Slack, and your suppliers' order feeds. Scout reads from them on a schedule and keeps a normalized copy of what it saw, so it can compare Monday to Thursday and notice that something stopped moving.
2. It builds one evidence-backed picture. Scout recognizes the customers, contacts, quotes, orders, invoices, and suppliers inside those sources and links what belongs together. When two sources disagree about whether two records are the same customer, Scout shows you both and asks rather than merging quietly.
3. It raises points. A point is one item Scout raises for you, with the thread, invoice, or calculation that proves it. Points land in your Inbox — your living action item list — and the ones that matter most before tomorrow also land in your morning brief, one email a day.

The questions Scout asks of your data are called Watches: a fixed set of operational questions such as "has this supplier acknowledged our purchase order?" or "did we quote this below our margin floor?" Scout defines and maintains them; you turn them on, off, and tune their thresholds. See What Watches are.

The four things Scout never does

• It never writes to your systems. Every connection Scout makes is read-only. Scout does not edit, move, delete, or file anything in your mailbox, your accounting system, or a supplier's system. It reads and it remembers.
• It never sends anything to your customers or suppliers. Scout will write you a prepared draft you can read, edit, and copy into your own mail program. Sending is your click, from your mailbox, in your name. Scout prepares — you send.
• It never completes a transaction. Scout does not place a purchase order, change one, apply a payment, or issue a credit. Purchase orders are read-only in Scout today, and that is a deliberate design decision rather than a missing feature.
• It never quietly reads personal mail it was not granted. A personal mailbox is connected by the person who owns it, and what Scout learns from it stays with that person until an Owner or Admin approves sharing it — a decision that is recorded. See Who can see what.

Scout does produce output of its own, and it is always clearly labeled as Scout's: the morning brief, a prepared draft, a note on a closed item, and notifications to you and your teammates. That is the whole list.

What you can connect today

Gmail and Google Workspace mailboxes, Microsoft 365 and Outlook mailboxes (including a named shared mailbox such as a sales address), QuickBooks Online, Slack, and your suppliers' PromoStandards feeds. Each connection has its own article in Connections. Other connections — a CRM, and uploaded files — are described in the Connections category as coming soon, and are not available today.

Good to know

• One workspace is one operating company. Everything in it — points, evidence, teams, connections — stays inside it.
• Scout never invents a date. Every due date it shows comes from evidence you can open, or the item is marked as having no due date.
• Nothing in Scout is deleted. Items that close, lapse, or get dismissed stay in the Settled archive with a record of how they closed.
• Plans are named by headcount band — Launch, Growth, Scale, and Enterprise — and are flat per workspace, with seats unmetered. See the Plan page in Settings for current pricing.