The Watch effectiveness report
The Watch effectiveness report answers one question: is each Watch earning its place? It shows what every Watch surfaced, what your team did about it, and what it booked on the Found ledger — for the last thirty or ninety days, side by side with the settings that produced those numbers.
Opening it
- Open the profile menu at the top right and choose Workspace settings.
- Under Workspace, choose Watches.
- Select What Scout has caught at the bottom of the section.
Screenshot: the Watch effectiveness report.
The header names your workspace and adds a line you should read carefully: Only points visible in your current scope. The report is filtered by what you are allowed to see. Two people in the same workspace can open it and get different numbers, and neither is wrong — an Owner sees the whole book, a Member sees their own work and their teams'.
Choosing the period
Two buttons switch the window: Last 30 days (the default) and Last 90 days. The exact dates the report is using are printed beside them, so you always know what "last 30 days" means today.
What each column means
There is one table per category — Financial, Follow-ups, Supplier Integration, Pattern Recognition, Support — and one row per Watch, with six columns.
| Column | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Watch | The Watch's name, with its state underneath: On, Off, Coming soon or Retired. |
| Surfaced | How many points this Watch put in front of somebody in the period. |
| Acted on | How many of those a person handled — closed with the work done. |
| Dismissed | How many a person dismissed with a note. Dismissals are not failures; they are how you teach Scout. |
| Found | The money booked on the Found ledger from this Watch's points in the period, with the kind it books under printed beneath: Collected, Avoided or Margin. |
| Current settings | The Watch's thresholds in plain words — for example Acknowledgement window: 2 business days, or Default terms: 30 days · Grace period: None. A Watch with nothing to tune reads No adjustable thresholds. |
Each row ends with Adjust settings, which closes the report and opens that Watch's detail panel. If you cannot change Watch settings the button reads View settings instead, and a line at the top of the report says Read only. An Owner or Admin can adjust Watch settings.
The category subtotal
Each table ends with a Category subtotal row: the surfaced, acted-on and dismissed counts added up, and then the money shown as three separate figures — one Collected, one Avoided, one Margin. They are deliberately not added together. A dollar collected is cash in the bank; a dollar avoided is a charge that never happened; a dollar of margin is profit protected. Adding them would produce a number that does not mean anything.
What an empty row means
Dashes are the honest answer, not an error. A row reads as dashes when any of the following is true:
- The Watch is marked Coming soon — its detection is still being built, so it has raised nothing.
- The Watch is Off in your workspace.
- The Watch is on, but the source it needs is not connected yet — so it recorded that it could not run rather than guessing.
- The Watch ran and found nothing worth raising in the period. This is the good outcome.
- Points were raised but nobody has rated them yet, so there is no accuracy figure to show. Accuracy is built only from points marked useful or wrong; see Rating a point.
In a brand-new workspace every row is dashes. That is what a brand-new workspace should look like.
Using it to tune
The report is the input to Configuring Watches, and the pairing of the two right-hand columns is the point of it. If a Watch surfaced a lot and was dismissed most of the time, it is probably too eager — widen its window. If it surfaced nothing over ninety days while you know the problem is real, it is probably too patient, or its source is not connected. If accuracy is high and Acted on is high, leave it alone.
Good to know
- Found figures come from actual receipts on the Found ledger, not from estimates a Watch made when it raised the point.
- Accuracy is calculated as useful divided by useful plus wrong. Points marked Not useful do not count against a Watch — that verdict means "correct, but not something I need".
- The numbers are rebuilt from the record rather than kept as a running total, so a correction to a point corrects the measurement instead of leaving a stale figure behind. Late verdicts are picked up too.
- The report is a read of your own workspace. Nothing about any other workspace appears in it.
- Each per-Watch detail panel carries a smaller version of the same idea — Its last points · 30 days — if you want to see the individual items rather than the totals.