The short answer
Go to Options & settings
Select 'Statistics & Alerts definitions' from the submenu
Go to tab 'Alerts'
Click 'New' to start a new alert
Enter a description. (The description will be the label used to
display the alert in the Home view.)
TIP: If an alert doesn't appear at launch click 'Refresh'; if you still don't see it go back to Options & settings > Statistics & Alerts definitions > 'Alerts' to check if the box 'Active' has accidentally been unticked.
More (from the User's Guide)
For the attribute “Category”, select the category of alert-related information you wish to use.
There are two broad categories of alerts:
1. General
The General category includes a number of pre-defined events which can be used for
creating alerts. These include events such as License expiration, invoices due, royalty
statements due, etc. (see below for a complete list).
2. Task-related categories
The task-related categories (Royalty contract tasks, License tasks, Purchase tasks) allow you
to define alerts based on user-defined tasks used throughout the system, in “Schedule &
tasks” sections of your data. (For example, if you have defined a royalty contract task for
“send author’s copies”, you can create an alert for tracking royalty contracts where this task
is due or overdue).
After selecting the category (“General”, or one of the task-related categories), proceed to the “Event
or Task” attribute. The drop-down selection shows the events or tasks that are available for the
selected category.
If you have selected the General category, the events available in the “Event or Task” attribute
include:
- AlertTypeDesc
- Invoices due
- License expiration
- License first publication
- Royalties-in payments due
- Royalties-in statements due
- Royalty run due
- Royalty statements due
- Submission expiration
- Submission follow-up
- Submission quotes
- Submission samples
If you have selected one of the task-related categories, then the “Event or Task” attribute will display
all the tasks you have defined within your database. For example, if you have defined a license task
called “approve translation”, this will appear in the “Event or Task” list for the “License tasks”
category.
For the attribute “With the following filter (optional)”, select a filter to narrow-down the information
which will be included in this alert, or leave blank to include all the items from the relevant data
view. (Example: if you want to monitor expiring licenses for a particular product line, you can create
a filter in the Licenses view which selects that product line only, and use this in the filter option of
the alert definition).
NOTE: the dropdown list for filters in the alerts definition will display all the filters defined for the
data view associated with the selected alert event or task, but the filter must be defined in advance.
To define a filter, go to Data & functions, select the relevant data view and click “Filters & tags”.
Specify the filter criteria, then click “Save filter” and give your filter a name. This filter will then be
available in the Alerts definition dialogue.
For the attribute “Warning period (days)”, specify the number of days advance notice for which you
want items to be flagged as ‘due’.
For example, if you are creating an alert for expiring licenses, if you specify 90 days for the warning
period, then the “due” column will show how many licenses are due to expire within the coming 90
days, while the “overdue” column will show how many licenses have expired.
Select the “Active” attribute to include this alerts in the Home view. (If you deselect the Active
attribute, the alert definition is retained, but the alert is not displayed in the Home view.)
Use the “Position” attribute to determine the order in which the alerts are displayed in the Home
view.