What Watches are (overview and the five categories)

A Watch is one standing question Scout asks of your connected data every morning — "has this purchase order been acknowledged?", "is this invoice past its terms?", "has anyone told the customer their order shipped?" When the answer is yes, Scout raises a point: one item in your Inbox with the proof behind it. There are eighteen Watches, and this article lists all of them.

The Watches section of workspace settings, showing the eighteen Watches grouped under five categories with a books-as chip and a thirty-day accuracy figure on each row.

Screenshot: Settings → Workspace → Watches.

Scout writes the Watches — you tune them

Watches are defined by Scout and are the same in every workspace. You cannot write a new one, and you do not need to: the eighteen were chosen from research into where promotional products distributors actually lose money and time. What your workspace does control is which Watches are on and how sensitive each one is. That is covered in Configuring Watches.

Two promises hold for all eighteen. First, a Watch only reads — it never writes to Gmail, Outlook, QuickBooks Online, or a supplier's system, and it never sends anything to your customer or your supplier. Where a Watch can help with the reply, it prepares a draft for you to copy. Scout prepares — you send. Second, every point cites its evidence: the thread, the invoice, the supplier record, or the arithmetic that produced it.

Three kinds of value: Collected, Avoided and Margin

Each Watch targets exactly one kind of value, shown on its row in the Books as column and counted on the Found ledger when the point resolves.

Collected — money that came in that would otherwise have been missed: a late receivable, a job nobody invoiced, a credit never applied.
Avoided — a cost or a failure that never happened: a rush charge, a missed in-hands date, a "where is my order?" call you got ahead of.
Margin — margin protected or won on a quote, an order, or a supplier bill.

A Watch never books two kinds. Some catches protect something real without moving money — a duplicate invoice caught, a customer told before they asked — and those close without an amount under the same heading.

The five categories and all eighteen Watches

Settings groups the Watches into five categories, and each row carries a short code (FI-1, SI-3 and so on) so you can find it again. Three Watches are raising points today. The rest show Coming soon: the row and its preferences exist, and detection is still being built. Those rows say so plainly, with no date attached.

Financial — money: receivables, billing, supplier invoices, credits, quote margin

FI-1 · Receivables past due — Collected
FI-2 · Unbilled or double-billed end-user customers — Collected
FI-3 · Quote margin guard — missing charges and the margin floor — Margin
FI-4 · Invoice reconciliation — purchase order versus supplier invoice — Margin
FI-5 · Promised credit, reship or replacement not received — Collected

Follow-ups — conversations: replies owed, approvals pending, updates the customer is due

FO-1 · Waiting on a reply — customer side — Avoided
FO-2 · Customer hasn't been told — shipment, delay or tracking update due — Avoided
FO-3 · PO pre-flight — incomplete or inconsistent quote and PO details — Avoided

Supplier Integration — supplier data: acknowledgements, holds, stock, lead times, prices, production, freight

SI-1 · PO not acknowledged — or acknowledged differently than ordered — Avoided
SI-2 · Supplier is waiting on us — order on hold, response required — Avoided
SI-3 · Production delay — the order will not ship in time — Avoided
SI-4 · Inventory short for a quote or order — Avoided
SI-5 · Supplier price change, price expiration or discontinuation — Margin
SI-6 · Order-by date approaching on an unplaced quote — Avoided
SI-7 · Freight and transit estimates — Avoided

Pattern Recognition — history and baselines rather than single messages

PA-1 · Reorder windows, seasonal patterns and quiet accounts — Margin
PA-2 · Supplier performance drift — Avoided

Support — support requests tied to their customer and order

SU-1 · Support requests married to customer and order — Avoided

Every Watch declares the sources it needs

A Watch cannot answer its question without something to read. Each one declares the kinds of source it needs, and the detail panel in Settings shows them as Required, One required (either of two will do) or Helpful, with the logo of each provider that can satisfy the category — in full color when you have it connected, dimmed when you do not. The four source kinds the Watches read are your mailbox, your accounting system, your supplier feed, and a CRM. Some of those providers are not available to connect yet; their logos stay dimmed until they are.

A Watch that is missing a required source says so rather than going quiet, and it shows up under the Needs attention filter in Settings. Two Watches — inventory short (SI-4) and supplier waiting on us (SI-2) — cannot run at all without a supplier feed. Most of the others fall back to a reduced, mailbox-only form and tell you which supplier was checked and when.

Good to know

A Watch either raises a point or records that it ran and found nothing. Silence is a result, not a failure.
Most Watches produce recommendations — something to do. Reorder windows (PA-1) and supplier performance drift (PA-2) produce observations — something to know.
Every row in Settings carries a thirty-day accuracy figure built from the points you marked useful or wrong. Rating points is how a Watch gets better; see Rating a point.
The Explain Watches button at the top of the Watches section opens a short explainer video.
Turning a Watch off is a workspace-wide decision and only an Owner or an Admin can make it.