Needs Attention
StudioFlow watches your studio for things at risk of slipping — an unanswered inquiry, an unsigned contract before a shoot, a gallery that's overdue for delivery — and surfaces each one as an attention item. The promise is simple: no client-facing deadline is ever silently missed. Items appear on the Dashboard, ring the notification bell, resurface in a daily digest if ignored, and clear themselves automatically the moment the underlying problem is fixed.
Where to find it
Two places, showing the same items:
- Needs Attention in the sidebar — a full page of its own, open to everyone. This is the one to bookmark if you start your day here.
- The Needs Attention widget on the Dashboard — the same list, alongside everything else.
Both have two tabs:
- Mine — items addressed to you personally (your overdue tasks, urgent mentions).
- Studio — studio-wide items your access level is meant to act on.
Each item shows a severity (high items are styled more urgently) and links straight to the thing that needs handling. Every new item also creates a bell notification; push notifications go out only for high-severity items and urgent mentions, so a push always means something.
Anything addressed to you personally always reaches you, whatever your access level — your overdue task, an urgent mention. Studio items are routed by level to whoever can actually close them:
- Owners and Admins see all of them.
- Bookkeepers see the money ones: an overdue invoice, a draft invoice never sent, a job with no final invoice, an unpaid deposit before a shoot, and a job whose paid deposit still needs a credit note.
- Crew see the three that are about work waiting to be done: a client email nobody answered, a project with nobody assigned to it, and a project with no shoot booked.
Craft tags make no difference to any of this.
What Gets Flagged
Always-on checks
These are fixed platform guarantees — always active, not configurable:
| Item | When it appears |
|---|---|
| Invoice overdue | A sent invoice passes its due date |
| Offer expiring | A sent offer expires within 7 days |
| Contract not accepted | A sent contract has waited more than 5 days |
| Shoot without a contract | A shoot within 30 days has no accepted contract |
| Task overdue | An open task passes its due date |
| Urgent mention | Someone mentioned you urgently in chat — clears only when you dismiss it |
| Approval waiting | An automation action has waited for approval more than 24 hours |
Adjustable timing rules
A second set of rules watches how long things sit between steps. Each has a threshold in days that an Owner or Admin can tune (or switch off entirely) under Settings → Studio setup → Attention & Reminders — a simple toggle plus a number of days per rule, for example:
| Rule | Default |
|---|---|
| New inquiry with no first response (no offer or questionnaire sent) | 1 day |
| Confirmed inquiry with no offer sent | 3 days |
| Draft offer created but never sent | 3 days |
| Draft contract created but never sent | 3 days |
| Draft invoice created but never sent | 3 days |
| Project still not advanced after its shoot date | 2 days |
| Gallery not delivered since post-production started | 30 days |
| Post-production stalled | 21 days |
| Final invoice not sent after delivery | 7 days |
| Deposit unpaid with the shoot approaching | 14 days |
| Inbox email unanswered | 2 days |
| Client still choosing their gallery favorites | 14 days |
Switching a rule off also clears its existing open items.
While a project sits in Waiting for Selection — the client is picking their gallery favourites — the delivery timers pause — the client is the one taking time, not the studio. Only the "client still choosing" rule runs during that phase.
Items Clear Themselves
You don't have to tidy the list. Every check both detects a problem and notices when it's gone: pay the invoice, send the offer, deliver the gallery — and the item resolves on its own. The widget only ever shows problems that are genuinely still true.
Snooze and Dismiss
For items you've seen but can't (or won't) act on yet:
- Snooze — hides the item for 1 day, 3 days, or 1 week, then it comes back.
- Dismiss — removes the item for good. Studio items are dismissed for the whole studio (any authorized viewer can do it, with an Undo toast in case of a slip); personal items can only be dismissed by their owner. A dismissed item stays dismissed even if the check runs again — StudioFlow respects your decision.
The Daily Digest
Every morning at 08:00 studio time, each team member with open attention items gets a digest email and a push ("You have N items needing attention"). No open items, no digest — it's never empty noise. Turn it off for yourself with Daily attention summary in Settings → Application Preferences → Notifications.
Escalation
If an item sits open for roughly three times its normal threshold, StudioFlow escalates it once: a studio-wide push and bell notification ("Attention item unhandled: …"). It never repeats, so long-ignored items get one loud nudge without turning into spam. Personal urgent mentions are the exception — they only resurface through the recipient's own digest, never studio-wide.