Daily work

Choose what Winston watches

Use Overview's monitoring settings to focus the page on the parts of the business that matter to you.

Change the monitoring areas

Open Overview → Edit beside Watching. The panel is titled What should Winston keep watching? and lists seven areas: Inventory, Sales and margin, Customers, Promotions, Controls, Buying and vendors, and Holidays. Each area card says what it covers and how many checks it holds; open N checks to read each check's one-line description. Holidays also lists the dates it will recap next. A line under the grid totals it: "Winston is watching eight checks."

The panel states how often the checks run and in what window. Treat that sentence, not a guess, as the cadence. Data on a card is still only as fresh as its POS data as of line.

An available area still needs the right data. A monitor listed under Coming soon (Compliance, Website and marketing) is not active just because a related system is connected. Check now with no area selected opens this panel instead of running, because choosing an area is the only thing that changes the outcome.

The monitoring settings panel: a list of monitoring areas with checkboxes, the sensitivity selector, the standing instructions note box, and Save overview and Cancel buttons — Monitoring settings: areas, sensitivity and the standing note, with Save overview and Cancel.

Choose sensitivity

Setting	Use it when
Critical only	You want the most urgent findings.
Balanced	You want urgent findings and other clearly material issues.
More signals	You also want smaller findings.

Each option previews its effect on today's page: showing 2 now on the current setting, would show 4 on another. Higher sensitivity can surface more findings. It does not guarantee a card for every record or create monitors for unsupported data. Details ends with the same sentence in the same words, so you can see which setting is holding a check back.

Add a standing instruction

Use the note to describe a specific priority or exclusion. Be clear about the store, item and condition. For example:

Focus inventory review on Downtown. Prioritize items likely to run out before the next delivery. Explain any rule you cannot apply.

An instruction is a request for Winston to interpret. When you save, Winston reads the note, turns it into the adjustments it applies to this page, and shows you exactly what changed. It is not proof that a matching rule has been saved or can be supported. After Save overview, read the confirmation and any explanation of what changed. Reopen Edit to check the saved text. If no applied changes are shown, ask for clarification before relying on the new behavior.

Show me fewer like this, on a card's menu, writes to the same note. If a kind of finding stops appearing and you did not expect that, read the note before looking anywhere else.

The monitoring dialog scrolled to the standing instructions box, with the Coming soon monitors listed beneath it — The note is free text Winston interprets on save. Coming soon marks monitors that are not active yet, whatever is connected.

Standing instructions also travel with every review conversation you open from a card. They are different from a one-off chat message and from a scheduled task.

What reaches you

Your checks is the panel that decides what you see and what emails you. Open it from Choose what on the email banner under the status line, or from Your checks… in any card's menu. The banner goes away for good once you act on it or close it, so the card menu is the route you will use later. The footer links in a Winston email open the same panel.

Every check is listed with a Show switch and an Email switch. The panel is explicit that Winston runs all of them on its schedule whichever way you set them; the switches only decide what reaches you. A check inside an area you follow reads Already shown, it's in an area you follow and its Show switch stays on. Scheduled task failures is the one check not tied to an area; switch it on here if you want failed jobs on your page or in your inbox. See Scheduled-task failures.

The Your checks panel: a header saying Winston runs all of these whichever way you set them and the switches only decide what reaches you, then one row per check with a Show switch and an Email switch, and below them Send serious ones, the Daily summary hour and a line stating that no check is set to email you — Your checks. The line at the bottom states what will actually be emailed; here, nothing.

Email has two settings of its own: Send serious ones straight away or hold them for the summary, and the Daily summary hour. A line at the bottom states the current result, for example "No check is set to email you, so Winston sends you no email at all." An email arrives for a new problem or one getting worse, not while a problem simply continues. Unsubscribe from all in an email footer switches every Email switch off before it returns you to the panel, which says so.

If the note could not be applied

A note can be stored as text even when its requested changes were not applied. If the message says previous instructions remain active, treat the new note as unapplied.

Open Edit and read the error. Make the request more specific and save again. If it still fails, stop retrying and contact Support with the workspace, note text, error and time. Do not paste API keys or unrelated customer information into the report.

Use Cancel to close the settings without saving edits.

For a new kind of recurring check, see Request a custom monitor. A monitoring note does not automatically create a new data connection, skill or scheduled task.