My Alerts: Per-Person Channels and Margin-Drop Thresholds

Settings › My alerts lists five kinds of exception alert: stockouts and low stock, margin drops, stuck approvals (the pending-approval digest), failed syncs (workflow failures and QuickBooks item or purchase order sync failures), and ageing receivables (the overdue-invoice digest). For each one a person ticks email, push or SMS. The same screen is in the AWRA mobile app, so a buyer can change how they are told from their phone.

Three rules decide the outcome, in this order. First, the workspace switch for that alert and channel in the notification settings is the ceiling: if email is off for the overdue-invoice digest there, nobody gets it by email, and My alerts shows a lock in that box. Second, a person’s own choice narrows the ceiling or adds them. With no choice saved, Admins get email and push as they always have, everyone else gets neither, and SMS is off for everyone. Third, a person must hold a permission that lets them see the records behind the alert: view items for stockouts, view accounting for margin drops, any approval permission for stuck approvals, view workflows or integrations for syncs, and view invoices for receivables. An alert they cannot see is not listed at all.

In practice: a retail chain has one Admin who has been getting every alert by email. The store manager holds view items and opts in to stockouts by push; the accountant holds view invoices and view accounting and opts in to overdue invoices and margin drops by email; the Admin unticks stockouts, because the store manager now owns them. The cashier, who holds none of those permissions, opens My alerts and sees an empty list, which is correct rather than broken.

A text costs the workspace money per message, so SMS has four conditions and every one must hold: the workspace SMS switch on for that alert, the person’s own opt-in on My alerts, a working SMS provider set up for the workspace, and a valid phone number on the person’s profile. If any one is missing, no text is sent and the person’s email and push choices still work as before.

Each text is a single segment of at most 160 characters. It carries counts only, such as how many items are low or how many invoices are overdue, and never a customer name, an item name or an amount. A phone screen can be read by anyone standing nearby, and a text cannot be recalled once it has gone, so the detail stays in the app and on the web, where the person signs in and their permissions apply.

In practice: a branch supervisor wants a text when stock runs low because she is on the shop floor all day. The Admin confirms the SMS provider is working and that SMS is allowed for the low-stock alert in the notification settings. The supervisor adds her mobile number to her profile, ticks SMS for stockouts on My alerts in the app, and the next morning gets a text saying how many items are at or below their reorder level, then opens the app to see which ones.

The margin-drop alert works out each item’s realised margin over a window: revenue minus cost, divided by revenue, across POS sales and issued customer invoices. POS lines use the cost stamped at the moment of sale, and invoice lines use the item’s moving-average cost. An item is flagged when its margin is below the floor, or when it has dropped by more than the set number of points against the window before. It fires once per item per window, so an item that stays low is not repeated every day.

Four thresholds apply to the whole workspace, and people who manage settings change them in the Margin-drop thresholds panel on My alerts: the floor (15% by default), the drop in points (10), the window (30 days, from 7 to 180) and the minimum revenue in the window (1,000 in the base currency), which stops an item that sold once from being flagged. The alert is per item and in the base currency only. Service items, consignment and customer-owned stock, and items with no cost are left out, because a margin on them would not be a real figure, and sales in another currency are left out rather than converted.

In practice: a hardware wholesaler’s supplier raises the price of cement, the buying price feeds the moving average, and selling prices are not updated. Over the next 30 days cement’s margin falls from 22% to 9%: below the 15% floor and down 13 points, so the accountant gets one margin-drop alert for it. The wholesaler sells high volumes on thin margins, so the Admin later lowers the floor to 8% and raises the minimum revenue to 50,000, and the alert stops flagging small, slow items.