My alert didn't notify me

If an alert stayed quiet, the charge or balance it watches usually hasn't been checked yet, or it can't set that alert off. Here is how alerts work and how to see what went off.

How alerts work

• Three kinds. Your AI can set an alert for a single charge over an amount, an account balance that drops below an amount, or a budget reaching a share of its cap. To create one, see set up an alert.
• Checked when data lands, not in real time. Pennyweight checks your alerts when a transaction is added or imported, after a bank sync, and when your AI connects. New bank transactions reach your ledger at your next session, when you open the web app or your AI calls Pennyweight. See how bank sync works.
• Each alert goes off once per thing it watches. A charge alert goes off once per charge. A balance alert goes off once each time the balance drops below the amount, then waits until the balance is back at or above it. A budget alert goes off once per budget month.
• Every time an alert goes off, Pennyweight saves it. Your AI can show you that history. When your AI connects, Pennyweight tells it how many you haven't marked as read, so it can show you and mark them.
• Email is a short notice. An email alert, the default, also sends an email that says only "You have new Pennyweight alerts", with no amounts or names. You get at most one per clock hour (UTC). An in-app alert sends no email.

Why an alert stayed quiet

• New data hasn't reached Pennyweight. Open the web app or ask your AI something, then check again.
• The charge is older than the alert. A charge alert only looks at transactions added after you set it up and dated in the last 7 days. Importing past transactions never sets it off.
• The charge doesn't count. Transfers between your accounts don't count. A charge in a different currency from the alert's amount doesn't count either.
• It already went off. Each charge, balance drop and budget month counts once. Check the history.
• The alert is in another ledger. Each alert belongs to one ledger and watches only that ledger. See switch the active ledger.
• It's snoozed, or the budget can't be judged. A snoozed alert isn't checked until the snooze ends. A budget alert stays quiet for a paused budget, a savings goal, or a budget whose spending is in another currency.
• It's an older alert type. Alerts for new merchants, missed syncs or rising recurring charges are no longer checked. Your AI sees them marked as not evaluated, and they never go off.
• The alert is in-app only, or the email didn't arrive. The email goes to your account's primary email address. If an earlier email to it bounced permanently (for example, the address doesn't exist) or was marked as spam, Pennyweight stops sending to it. The history still has every alert that went off.

How to check what went off

1. Ask your AI to list your alerts. Each one shows when it last went off and how many times it went off that you haven't marked as read.
2. Ask for your alert history over a date range. Your AI can cover every ledger or just one.
3. After you've seen them, ask your AI to mark them as read. They stay in the history.

What you'll see

If you have no alerts, your AI says so. Otherwise it lists each alert with its name, kind and threshold. In the history, each entry shows the alert's name, the amount or percentage it saw, its threshold and when it went off. The check runs in the background, so right after you add a charge it may not have finished. If the history is empty, ask again a little later.

Good to know

• The web app has no alerts page. You set up and check alerts through your AI.
• You can snooze or delete an alert. Deleting needs a reason, which your AI gives. Its history stays.
• Budget alerts start from a budget. See set a monthly budget.
• Want a different kind of alert? Your AI can send a feature request to the Pennyweight team, and you see what it will send first. See report a problem or request a feature.
• How the pieces fit. Your AI is how you ask Pennyweight for anything. See how Pennyweight works.