The stock that was already below minimum on Friday. The payment that did not match the invoice. The deviation that only surfaced in the monthly report, three weeks too late. Almost every organisation knows those moments, and it is almost never because nobody wanted to look. It is because nobody can look all day.
A report tells you what happened. A dashboard tells whoever opens it. Neither says it at the moment it matters, to the person who can do something with it. That is the work of an alert, and it is the first stage of the growth path of a company brain: see.
If this, then the team knows
A good signal comes to the work, not the other way around. The team does not have to open a new system, refresh a dashboard or wait for a report. The signal appears where the work already happens: in Teams, in Outlook, in Slack or simply by e-mail.
If this, then the team knows
The mechanism is simple enough to describe in one sentence. A rule watches a governed business asset; when a value crosses a threshold, a message, a warning or an attachment follows. That attachment can contain exactly the rows that crossed the threshold, for example as an Excel, so nobody has to search for what it is about.
A rule is readable in plain language, and therefore manageable by the team itself. For example: "When the stock of an article drops below the minimum threshold, report it every morning at 07:00 in the purchasing channel, with the articles in question as an attachment." Whoever reads the rule knows what it does. Whoever wants to adjust it, adjusts the threshold.
An alert is as reliable as the data underneath
A notification on a loose file is a gamble. Is the latest version in there? Does "stock" mean the same here as in the warehouse system? Who changed that column yesterday? One false alarm is enough to teach a team that the channel can be ignored.
That is why an alert belongs not on a file, but on a governed business asset: one current truth, with a recorded definition of what "stock", "outstanding" or "overdue" means in this organisation, and an owner who is responsible for it. How an Excel becomes such an asset in minutes is described in Excel as a starting point: version control and collaboration with Datahub. The result is that a quiet day really is a good day, and a notification really is a notification.
Three alerts to start with
Most organisations need three kinds of signals to make the first stage work.
Three alerts to start with
- The threshold. A value that drops below or rises above an agreed threshold: stock, capacity, budget, lead time. The attachment contains exactly the rows concerned.
- The mismatch. Two sources that disagree: a payment without an invoice, an order without a delivery, an amount that differs between two systems. Daily at a fixed time, in the channel of the team that resolves it.
- The deadline. A date that approaches: a contract that ends, a certificate that expires, a deadline within ten days. Bundled weekly per owner, so nobody gets thirty separate messages.
It starts with little. Three to five rules that report something meaningful every day are worth more than thirty rules of which half are noise. Too many notifications and the team mutes the channel; then no rule helps anymore. The first weeks are therefore mostly about adjusting thresholds, until every notification is worth reading.
Why reporting stays free
The more signals a team shares, the more valuable the brain becomes. That is why reporting is free and unlimited, in every plan. There is only a generous fair-use limit, meant against mass mailing, not against use.
Signals in a shared channel also do something no report does: they get seen. The department next to purchasing sees the stock notification pass by every morning and wonders why they do not have something like it. That is how the first stage spreads from team to team, without anything having to be rolled out.
When a notification wants to be more
After a few weeks a pattern appears. The same notification triggers the same handling every day, and the same person picks it up every time, or nobody does. That is the moment a notification wants to be more than a message. It wants an owner, a status and a trail. That step, from notification to action list, is the bridge to the second stage of the route.
Frequently asked questions
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