Monthly Smart Summary
The Monthly Smart Summary is a scheduled, opt-in email that sends each of your customers a plain-language recap of their own account for the previous period: how many signals were handled, how their alarms were responded to, whether their equipment stayed online, open/close punctuality, and (optionally) their account balance.
Real-time app notifications already tell a customer what is happening now. This summary does the different, longer-arc job: a periodic retention and reassurance message — "here is your month, your alarm is being watched, and here is the proof" — that a security company can point to at renewal time. It is deliberately smarter than a plain event dump: the email leads with a short, plain-language narrative and a link into the customer's portal, not a static table.
Nothing is ever sent until a control-room manager switches the feature on for the VCR. Every figure is computed from the customer's own account, and the copy only ever states absolute facts — counts, dates, times, and percentages. It never promises a future response time or makes a commitment on your company's behalf.
What the email contains
The summary is built from the same numbers as the on-demand reports, so the email and the reports always agree. In order, it can carry:
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Narrative | A short, warm, plain-language recap of the period, written from the figures below. |
| Overview | Sites monitored, signals handled, and emergency signals — as headline figures. |
| Signals & alarms | Total signals, emergencies, equipment/malfunction, and the confirmed false-alarm count and rate. |
| Response to alarms | How many of the customer's alarms were dispatched to a responder, how many were attended on scene, and the average and fastest arrival times for the period (stated as absolute durations, never as a promised time). |
| Open / close punctuality | On-time percentage and late-to-close count against each site's operating hours. |
| Device health | Cameras online, hub uptime over the last 30 days, and any hubs that have gone quiet — proof the alarm is being watched. |
| Account | Invoiced, paid, and balance for the period. Off by default; turn it on only if you want customers to see figures in the same email. |
Every summary ends with a View your account button that opens the customer's portal — a no-login, tokenised view of their jobs, quotes, invoices, and statement.
The AI narrative
The narrative is written by an AI model from the computed figures only. It is constrained to:
- use only the numbers in the summary — it never invents a figure;
- state everything in absolute terms (counts, dates, times, percentages);
- never promise or imply a future response time, give an ETA, apologise, or make any commitment about future service.
If the AI is unavailable, the email falls back to a deterministic, equally-safe template built from the same figures — the summary always sends. You can turn the narrative off entirely for a figures-only email.
Cadence
The headline cadence is monthly — on the 1st of each month, each enrolled customer receives a summary of the previous calendar month. Two other cadences exist for parity with legacy history-report tools:
- Weekly — sent on Mondays, covering the previous week.
- Daily — sent each morning, covering the previous day.
Monthly is the default. Weekly and daily only ever send to a customer who has explicitly been given that cadence, so leaving the default in place means one email a month and nothing more.
Turning it on
- Go to Settings in the sidebar.
- Under Customer messaging, open Monthly Summary.
- Tick Send the Monthly Smart Summary to this control room's customers — the master switch. While it is off, nothing is sent to any customer.
- Choose how customers are enrolled:
- Enrol every active customer automatically — every active customer (including future ones) receives the summary, unless you exclude them individually.
- Leave it off to hand-pick customers one at a time on their detail page.
- Set the default cadence and choose which sections the email carries.
- Decide whether to include the AI narrative.
- Click Save summary settings.
Use Send me a sample on the settings card (or on a customer's detail page) to email the real, fully-rendered summary for a chosen customer to your own inbox. It always sends to the signed-in manager's own address, so you can preview exactly what a customer would receive before switching the feature on.
Enrolling a single customer
Open a customer from the Customers list and click Monthly summary in the header. From there you can:
- Enrol or exclude this customer. When the control room auto-enrols everyone, this lets you exclude one customer; when it does not, this is how you opt a customer in.
- Give the customer a different cadence (or leave it on the control-room default).
- See when the summary was last sent and send yourself a sample.
Recipients
Recipients are resolved per customer from:
- the customer's site contacts that have an email address and have not opted out of email, and
- the account's billing email.
A customer with no resolvable email address is skipped. A period with no activity at all is skipped rather than sending an empty email.
Delivery and metering
Summaries are sent by email through the platform's mail provider and are logged like every other customer email — so open and read status is tracked, and each send counts toward your VCR's messaging usage (Settings → Customer messaging → Messaging). The schedule runs automatically in the background; there is nothing to trigger by hand.
Only control-room managers (VCR or billing management access) can change the master switch, defaults, and per-customer enrolment. Everyone else sees them read-only.