Reminded Before the Date, Not After It
Most business software tells you about a date once it has passed. Your records already know when a bill falls due, a quote lapses or leave begins. Here is how AWRA reads those dates every morning and tells the one person who can still do something about them.
Ask anyone what an overdue report is for, and the honest answer is: finding out what already went wrong. A supplier bill shows up as overdue the day after the payment terms broke. A customer quote shows up as expired after the customer has bought elsewhere. The date was sitting on the record the whole time. Nobody was told while it still mattered.
Since today, AWRA reads those dates every morning and sends a reminder before they arrive, to the person who can act on them. It covers eleven situations across payables, accounting, inventory, sales, HR and security. They all follow the same three rules, which are the real subject of this post.
Eleven reminders, one morning pass
| Reminder | Goes to | When |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier bills due soon or overdue | People who can approve bills | Three days before a bill is due; weekly while any are overdue |
| Last month not closed | Accountants | From the 5th, weekly, while the close checklist is open |
| Stock count due or overdue | The assigned counter | On the due date; once more if overdue |
| Stock hold about to expire | Whoever placed the hold | About a day before it is released |
| Customer quote about to expire | Whoever wrote it | Three days before its valid-until date |
| Sales order past its expected date | Whoever raised it | The day after, if not fully invoiced |
| Leave starting or ending | The employee and their manager | The last working day before; the last day of leave |
| Expense claim left in draft | The employee | After three days untouched |
| Last month’s timesheets not approved | Timesheet approvers | From the 3rd, weekly |
| Access review due or overdue | Access reviewers | Three days before; weekly while overdue |
| Not clocked in, still clocked in | The employee | On the day, during the shift |
Each one has its own post in this series, because each has its own reasons for the timing. Read the supplier bills post for why the digest is weekly, or the leave post for why a Monday start is mentioned on the Friday.
Rule one: once per stage, never every morning
A reminder that arrives every day is a reminder people learn to delete. So every reminder is recorded as sent, against the record and the stage it was about. A bill is mentioned once when it comes within three days of its due date. If it then goes overdue, it is mentioned again, because that is new information. It is not mentioned on the third morning in a row just because the job ran.
Work that belongs to a team rather than to one record is handled differently. Overdue bills, an unfinished close checklist, timesheets still open: these are a backlog, and the useful reminder is one message a week listing what is left, not one per item per day. The week number goes into the record of what was sent, so a backlog digest repeats exactly weekly and no more.
Running the job twice sends nothing twice. The record of what was sent is the reason, not the clock.
The same record protected the first morning. A workspace with two years of history has old counts, old orders and old drafts that went stale long ago. A reminder about a count that went overdue in March is noise, so each overdue reminder only looks back a short window: two weeks for counts, thirty days for sales orders and draft claims. Older records are left to whoever owns the backlog.
Rule two: the person who can act
A reminder sent to everyone is a reminder owned by nobody. Each one goes to a specific person, worked out from the record: the person a count is assigned to, the person who wrote a quote, the person who placed a stock hold, the employee who started a claim. Where the work belongs to a role, it goes to whoever holds the permission for it, such as the people who approve supplier bills or manage accounts. When the person who raised a sales order has since left, the reminder goes to the people who manage sales orders instead of disappearing.
It arrives three ways at once: an email, a line in the bell inside AWRA, and a notification on their phone. Tapping the phone notification opens the record itself in the AWRA mobile app (the count, the quote, the leave request), not the home screen. Access reviews are the exception; they have no mobile screen yet, so that notification opens the app and the review is on the web.
Rule three: never about yesterday
Employees are reminded about what is in front of them and nothing else. The clock-in reminder fires during today’s shift. The leave reminder mentions the leave that is about to start. A punch left open last Tuesday is not chased by a message to the employee every morning since; it is listed for HR in a weekly digest and fixed with a correction. Only About Today explains why that rule matters more for staff than for managers.
Employees without a login are included
Leave and expense-claim reminders reach employees who have no AWRA account by email, with the private self-service link they already use to request leave or submit a claim.
Every reminder is a switch
Each of the eleven is its own row in Settings › Notification Preferences, with separate ticks for email, in-app and push. A workspace that wants the leave notice and not the draft-claim nudge switches one off and keeps the other. A team that lives on their phones can keep push and drop email. The timing is built into each reminder rather than set by a cadence control, because the timing is the point: three days before a bill is due is useful, three days after is not.
The short version
AWRA now reads the dates already on your records every morning and reminds the person who can act before the date arrives: bills, quotes, sales orders, stock counts, stock holds, leave, draft claims, timesheets, month-end close and access reviews, plus same-day clock-in and clock-out. Each reminder goes once per stage, team backlogs go weekly, employees are never chased about past days, and every reminder can be switched off per channel.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Eleven date-driven reminders across payables, accounting, inventory, sales, HR and security, checked every morning.
- Once per stage, recorded against the record, so a re-run or a busy morning sends nothing twice.
- Weekly digests for team backlogs: overdue bills, open close checklists, open timesheets, overdue access reviews.
- A short look-back on overdue reminders, so a workspace with years of history is not flooded on day one.
- Email, the in-app bell and a phone notification that opens the record in the AWRA mobile app.
- One switch per reminder per channel in notification preferences, on the web and in the app.
- Employees reminded only about today, and those without a login reached by email with their self-service link.
More we can add to your workspace
- Your own lead times per reminder, such as seven days before a bill instead of three, set per workspace.
- Escalation to a manager when a reminder has been ignored for a number of days you choose.
- One morning summary per person that gathers every reminder they are due into a single email.
- Text messages for these reminders, for staff who rarely open email or the app.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We do not remind an employee about a day that has already gone. A missed punch from last week is a correction for HR, and a daily message about it would only teach people to ignore the useful ones.
Lead times and escalation go together naturally, and we would scope them as one piece of work.
Anything above that you need, we can build for you
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do for your organisation. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are both in the product because clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself, and the same door is open for whatever you just read about. One qualification so this is worth what it claims: a small number of things on this blog we deliberately leave to a specialist rather than build — a statutory ledger we will not sign our name to, a rule that would decide a tax question for you, a clinical or member-funds record that belongs in a regulated system — and where that is true the post says so in those words. Everything else is a scope, a timeline and a price.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
The module-shaped additions, which are the ones readers ask for most often
A price list with real discount authority, a customer-facing quotation that expires, a bill of materials or recipe costing, a staff advance that is issued, acquitted and chased, a member or unit ledger, a matching rule that holds a payment. Each of these is a build rather than a setting, and each has been quoted before — a bigger piece of work than a custom field, with a written spec and a date instead of a roadmap slide.
The report, document or pack nothing currently produces
The board pack in the shape your board actually asks for, a donor or funder layout, an invoice or receipt template carrying what your regulator or your customer expects, a dataset the report builder cannot reach yet. Usually the fastest thing on this list to deliver, because the data is already in the system.
Systems, rails and hardware you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store, core banking or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Plus the physical edge: a scanner, a scale, a weighbridge or a till peripheral feeding the door it belongs to.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. Nothing here waits on a regulator or a published specification, which is why operational builds are the ones we quote fastest. Tell us the requirement that would otherwise rule us out — that is a better first conversation than a demo.
Tell us what your operation needsFour questions to ask about any reminder feature
If the reminder job runs twice, does anyone get two emails?
A good answer sounds like
No, because what was sent is recorded.
What it actually means
Reminders driven only by a clock repeat whenever the clock does. People stop reading them.
Who gets the reminder when the owner has left?
A good answer sounds like
A named fallback, such as whoever holds the permission.
What it actually means
Otherwise the reminders for a departed colleague’s records go to an inbox nobody reads.
What happens on the first morning, with years of old records?
A good answer sounds like
A look-back window.
What it actually means
Without one, the first day sends hundreds of reminders about things nobody can fix now.
Can I keep one reminder and stop another?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, per reminder and per channel.
What it actually means
One switch for all reminders means people switch them all off.
See every notification AWRA can send
The eleven reminders sit alongside approvals, alerts and digests, each one a switch.
Notifications and remindersFrequently asked questions
Does AWRA OpsHub send reminders before something is due?
Yes. Every morning it reads the dates on your records and reminds the person who can act: supplier bills three days before they are due, customer quotes three days before they expire, stock counts on their due date, stock holds a day before release, leave the working day before it starts, and more. Each reminder goes by email, in the in-app bell and as a phone notification.
Will people get the same reminder every day?
No. Each reminder is recorded against the record and its stage, so it goes once when the date approaches and once if it passes. Team backlogs such as overdue bills or open timesheets repeat once a week.
Can we switch off one reminder but keep the others?
Yes. Each reminder is its own row in Settings, Notification Preferences, with separate switches for email, in-app and push.
Are employees reminded about missed punches from earlier days?
No. Employees are only reminded about the current shift or the leave in front of them. Days left open in the past are listed for HR in a weekly digest and fixed with an attendance correction.
Do employees without an AWRA login get reminders?
Yes, for leave and expense claims. They get an email with the private self-service link they already use.
