Project status

Your project's home answers three questions that look similar and are not: what is still left to set up, what has broken, and what is worth doing next. Each has its own surface, and knowing which one is talking to you saves a lot of guessing.

The three surfaces

Get your project ready is the setup checklist. It lists the things you haven't done yet — import your audience, set up a channel, verify your business, add funds, send your first campaign — and it steps aside when nothing is pending.

Needs attention is the alerts panel. It lists what has broken, or is about to: a card that expired, a connector that stopped bringing contacts in, a campaign scheduled for tomorrow that your balance won't cover. Each one comes with a date when there is a deadline.

Grow your business is the suggestions list — next steps worth taking on this project. Nothing there is wrong or urgent: it's what would make the project work better now that it works at all. It also stays quiet until you've actually started; see why it can be empty.

They appear in that order for a reason: what is broken comes before what is unfinished, and both before what is merely worth doing. Any of the three can be absent — each one hides itself when it has nothing to say, and on a healthy, finished project the home shows none of them.

Why a brand-new project has no alerts

The rule that decides which surface a thing belongs to is worth knowing, because it explains most of what you'll see: not having something is the checklist's business, never the alerts'.

For an alert to appear, the thing has to exist and be broken. There is no expired card without a card, no disconnected connector without a connector, no underfunded campaign without a campaign. So a project that has just finished signing up sees a full checklist and no red at all — we won't tell you your balance is low right next to the step asking you to add funds.

What you may see on day one is something informative, such as a sender registration waiting on an operator. Nothing is broken and there is nothing for you to do — someone else is reviewing it, and that takes days, not minutes.

Why Grow your business can be empty

Suggestions are the deliberate exception to that rule: "you have contacts and no segment yet" is precisely a thing you don't have, and it's exactly what's worth saying.

What keeps that from becoming noise is a threshold. Nothing is suggested until the project has contacts and at least one sender — until then the checklist is in charge, and it does that job better. So an empty Grow your business on a young project isn't a fault: it's the checklist's turn.

That threshold looks at your project as it really is, not at how much of the checklist you've ticked. Skipping a step doesn't unlock suggestions, and completing one doesn't either — only actually having an audience and a way to send does.

Nothing is saved — everything is recalculated

There is no inbox of notifications here, and nothing to mark as read. Every time you open your project, all three surfaces are recalculated from your data at that moment.

Two consequences, and they're the ones that generate most of the questions:

• An alert disappears only when the problem is genuinely fixed. The expired card goes when you add another one; the half-finished connection goes when the data source is created. Nobody has to remember to clear anything, and nothing lingers pointing at a problem you already solved.
• No step is ever done forever. There is no "setup complete" flag, so a step you had completed comes back if its condition stops holding — you spend your balance, the only sender you had gets rejected, a new regulator appears. That's the point, not a glitch: what you see is true now.

Hiding things: what's yours and what's your team's

You can get some of these out of your way, and it's worth knowing what that actually does — because the three surfaces behave differently on purpose.

	Where it's saved	Who else is affected	Does it come back?
Skip a checklist step	On the project	Your whole team stops seeing it	If its condition stops holding
Hide an alert	In your browser	Nobody	When the problem changes, or after a few days for some
Dismiss a suggestion	In your browser	Nobody	No — see below

An alert you hide, or a suggestion you dismiss, is hidden from you, on that browser. Your colleagues still see it, it comes back if you switch machines, and — this is the part that matters — your assistant still sees it. Ask it whether everything is fine and it will tell you about the very thing you hid.

That difference is deliberate. A shared dismissal would hide a live failure from everyone in your organization, which is exactly what an alert must never do. A skipped step is the opposite: it's a decision about how your team wants to set the project up, so it belongs to the project.

Not every alert can be hidden, and the ones that can behave in one of two ways:

• Some can't be hidden at all — an overdue invoice, an account whose API is blocked. Hiding those would only delay the surprise.
• Some hide until something changes. Hide a half-finished Shopify connection and it stays hidden; leave a different one half-finished tomorrow and that one appears, because it's a different fact.
• Some come back after a few days, even if nothing has changed. That's what we do with an expired card: it's a problem that quietly gets worse while looking exactly the same, and hiding it forever would be hiding a breakdown in progress.

A dismissed suggestion doesn't come back on a timer. Say no to Send branded RCS messages and you won't be asked again next month. What brings one back is the situation changing. The seasonal campaign is the intended exception: next year's Black Friday is a different occasion from this year's, so it does return.

What Needs attention watches

Four families. What matters isn't the list itself but knowing that each entry has a precise condition behind it — so if something didn't warn you, there's a reason.

Money. An expired card, or one about to expire. A low balance — measured against your organization's threshold, and only once money has actually gone into the account. A failed subscription charge, an invoice due or overdue, and auto-recharge switched off on a project that has automations running. See Balance.

Data. An integration you authorized and never finished connecting, a connector whose access has dropped, and one that hasn't brought anything in for seven days — only if it ever synced, because one that never did is unfinished setup, not a fault. See Managing data sources.

Sending. A scheduled campaign your available balance won't cover, with its send time as the deadline; a campaign that went unpaid during its send; and an account whose API calls are being rejected.

Compliance. A sender registration a carrier or regulator turned down, one that's still under review, and a regulator's deadline — "on the 15th you stop being able to send to Spain", which is not the same as "you haven't registered Spain yet". See Spain.

What Grow your business suggests

Eight suggestions today, and the list grows. Each has a condition behind it, exactly like an alert — none of them is generic advice. The list always holds all of them, in priority order, each with its own button:

Suggestion	It appears when
Create your first segment	You have contacts and no segment, so every campaign goes to your whole audience. That's how a list starts producing unsubscribes instead of sales.
Check which events count as a sale	No sale has been recorded in the window we look at, so campaign revenue shows as zero. Often the sales are arriving and are landing as a different event — an order payment, a standalone payment, a lead, a won deal — so what is worth checking is which of your events counts as a sale. It opens a conversation with the assistant, which can look at the events your project actually receives; if the answer turns out to be a setting, that is Conversions & attribution. It can also simply be a quiet season — this is the one suggestion that can become true without you doing anything at all.
Keep your audience up to date on its own	Your contacts are being loaded by hand. A CSV is a photograph: right the day you upload it, and drifting from then on. See Data sources.
Start the “…” flow	A ready-made flow template starts from an event your project already receives, and you haven't used it yet. The template's name completes the title: Start the “Abandoned checkout” flow. Up to three are suggested at a time — the same ones the template gallery marks Recommended — each with its own row and its own dismissal. See template opens the gallery on that template and creates nothing; using it only creates a draft you review before turning it on. See Flow templates.
Expand your … coverage for …	One of your senders isn't registered yet in countries that together hold more than 10% of your contacts with a mobile number. The channel and the sender complete the title: Expand your SMS coverage for ACME. The row names those countries and their share — 18% of your contacts with a mobile number are in France and Portugal, where this sender is not registered yet — and on RCS it speaks of the agent instead. There is one row per sender, on SMS and RCS alike. Register countries opens that channel's settings, where each of those countries can be registered. If the list of countries changes, a dismissed row comes back. See Countries & regulation.
Upgrade your account	Your organization keeps spending month after month on the free plan, where it costs more. The only suggestion that looks at the whole account rather than this project.
Send branded RCS messages	The project sends SMS only, has no RCS agent yet, has already built a campaign, and RCS is available to your organization. See RCS.
Plan your … campaign	A date worth a campaign is coming up, and the occasion completes the title: Plan your Christmas campaign. There are seven occasions, suggested to every kind of business. Black Friday, Christmas and summer sales appear 45 days before the date; Cyber Monday, winter sales, Valentine's Day and Halloween, 30 days before; each one stays until the day itself. Each occasion is a suggestion of its own, with its own row in the list and its own slide in the banner, and several can coincide: in November, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. Dismissing one leaves the others. It gives you the date when it knows it, and just says the date is close when it doesn't.

Four of them also get the banner at the top: Get more out of Instasent (the plan), Your brand, inside the message (RCS), Flows ready for your events (one slide for all the suggested templates, whose See templates opens the gallery with every template) and the seasonal ones, each titled after its occasion: Winter sales are coming, Valentine's Day is coming, Summer sales are coming, Halloween is coming, Black Friday is coming, Cyber Monday is coming or Christmas is coming. Seasonal slides always come first in the banner. The banner is a highlight, not a separate set — the list still has them.

Two things about the plan suggestion in particular, because it's the one that sells you something rather than helping your project work:

• On its own, it isn't shown at all. If upgrading is the only thing left to suggest, the home shows no banner and no list — neither surface. A section called Grow your business holding nothing but an ad for us would teach you what the section is for from its worst example. Alongside other suggestions it's a fair option among options.
• Dismissing it covers your whole organization. Upgrading is bought once for the account, so turning the suggestion down silences it everywhere rather than once per project. The other seven are per project.

Two things that appear in both places

There are exactly two situations where the checklist and the alerts talk about the same country at the same time. Both are deliberate, and in both cases the two sentences say genuinely different things.

A regulator's deadline. The checklist recommends registering a country from the moment the regulation exists. The alert only appears in the 30 days before the date, and only for countries you can send to today. During those four weeks the checklist is telling you there's a gap to close, and the alert is telling you what happens on a specific date to something you can still do right now.

A rejected registration. A country whose registration was turned down shows up as an alert and as a country still to register, because a rejected registration isn't coverage. After thirty days it stops being news and stays only on the checklist. It doesn't vanish — it moves.

Where each thing is actually fixed

This page explains the three surfaces. The fixing lives with the topic: