Understanding your morning briefing

Every morning at around 6:00 AM Central, PoolHelm reads your whole operation — routes, chemistry, weather, money, loose ends — and writes you the three to five things that actually need a decision. It’s on your Today page, at the top, before anything else.

It is not a feed. It’s short on purpose. If your briefing has five cards, five things need you; it doesn’t have a page two.

Five cards, each with its evidence and one action — and the setup counter underneath.

What a card is made of

• A headline that states the problem, not the category — “3 pools at dangerously low chlorine”, not “Chemistry.”
• The evidence, in one sentence, with the actual numbers: “2 ppm FC at Lawson, Owens, Bennett (min 4.7–6 ppm vs. CYA) — alert techs before next visit.” You shouldn’t have to go and check whether the card is right.
• An action that takes you where the problem is — Review invoices, See today’s routes, View customer, Alert techs.
• Mark done, for when you’ve handled it.

Reading a card is not resolving it. A card stays until you mark it done or the thing it’s about goes away. That’s deliberate: an alert that vanishes because you glanced at it is an alert you’ll miss on a busy morning.

The kinds of card you’ll see

• Work that moved — carried-over stops landing on today, and whether that overloads someone.
• Chemistry — pools out of range, judged against that pool’s targets rather than one generic set, so a heavily stabilized pool isn’t flagged for a reading that’s fine for it.
• Weather — storms timed against your stops. See “Weather alerts and customer notifications.”
• Money — invoices drafted but never sent, overdue balances, a dispute deadline you can’t afford to miss.
• Things that will cost you quietly — a chemical that can’t be priced and is therefore going unbilled, an urgent issue a tech reported days ago and nobody picked up.
• Setup that isn’t finished — customers who can’t go active yet, with a count and a link.

If a briefing is empty, nothing needed you. That’s a good morning, not a broken feature.

Two settings. Under Settings → AI Preferences you’ll find sections for the briefing’s delivery time, focus and tone marked “More controls coming soon.” The briefing itself works; the knobs to tune it aren’t built. See “AI and weather preferences.”