How Ayora Flags Work

Ayora flags are prompts that help users act on matters that may need commercial, billing, budget, or workflow attention. A flag is the user-visible item: it can appear in an Ayora email, on a dashboard, or inside a matter-related workflow.

Behind the scenes, Ayora receives signals from firm data and Ayora workflows, turns those signals into scheduled items, routes them to the right recipient, and tracks what happens next.

1. What A Flag Is

A flag is a matter-level or workflow-level item that asks someone to review, decide, or take action.

Flags usually include:

The matter and client context.
The reason Ayora is surfacing the matter.
Supporting values such as WIP, unpaid bills, budget position, dates, or short status tags.
A suggested next action, where available.
A status showing whether the flag is active, silenced, sent, opened, followed up, or actioned.

In product language, use flag for the item users see. Use intervention only where the documentation needs to describe a configured Ayora workflow type. Use trigger mainly in admin or technical reference material.

2. What Ayora Can Flag

Ayora flags cover several categories of matter and revenue-management risk.

Area	What Ayora may flag	Example user-facing purpose
Debt and collections	Bills that have been unpaid for a while; matters where further work may need attention because bills remain unpaid	Prompt the matter owner to review credit control history, speak to Credit Control, or contact the client
WIP and billing readiness	Matters with unbilled WIP; matters that may be ready for billing; matters with no recent time added	Prompt billing review and help reduce WIP days
Billing-plan issues	Missed billing dates; work from a previous month that remains unbilled	Prompt users to review billing dates and billing plans
Budget pressure	Matters approaching or exceeding budget; matters with work but no budget; monthly budget exceeded	Prompt budget review, client conversation, or budget update
Matter completion spotting	Matters where recent time narratives suggest the matter has reached a clear completion, closing, settlement, termination, final-advice, or post-completion/wrap-up point	Prompt users to review whether the matter is complete, whether remaining WIP should be billed, and whether any follow-up is only administrative
Follow-up preparation	Billing guide preparation after certain WIP or billing-readiness flags	Route admin follow-up to legal support staff where configured

3. Special Interventions: Admin Workflows And WIP Alarms

Not every Ayora item should be presented as a general commercial flag. Some items are better explained as separate intervention types.

Admin Workflows

Admin workflows are generated by user or system actions and often route work to finance, revenue, or support teams.

Examples include:

Write-off instruction: created when a user requests a write-off. Ayora creates a finance-manager item and temporarily silences related matter flags.
Budget updated notification: created when a matter budget is updated through Ayora. Ayora can notify the relevant finance manager and silence the originating budget flag.
Billing-guide follow-up: created after certain billing-readiness or WIP flags are delivered, so support staff can prepare the next administrative step.

These workflows should be documented separately from ordinary matter-risk flags because they are consequences of an action or a configured workflow, not just background monitoring.

WIP Alarms

WIP alarms should also be presented separately. They behave like configured alerts: when a WIP alarm is sent, Ayora records that the alarm has triggered for the matter.

Unlike ordinary grouped commercial flags, WIP alarms are not primarily a digest-style recommendation. They are alarm events tied to configured WIP monitoring.

4. How Flags Are Delivered In Emails

Ayora does not necessarily send one email per flag.

Flags are scheduled, filtered, grouped, and rendered into email content. The daily email process looks for items that are:

Scheduled for today.
Enabled.
Not already delivered.
Not silenced for their scheduled date.

Ayora then resolves the recipient and builds the email.

Depending on configuration, emails may be:

Batched by intervention: multiple items of the same type can appear together.
Combined across groupable interventions: a recipient may receive a single email containing several types of grouped flags.
Sent separately: admin workflows, alarms, or non-groupable interventions can be delivered as their own emails.

Emails can include:

Matter-level item lists.
Short summaries and preheader text.
Links back into Ayora.
Suggested calls to action.
KPI context, where enabled.
Tracking information for sent/opened status.

After an email is sent, Ayora records a delivery log. Delivery can also create a cooldown so the same flag does not immediately reappear.

5. How Flags Appear On Dashboards

The same underlying flag items can appear on Ayora dashboards and in role-specific views.

Dashboards can show:

Active and historical flags.
The flag title and trigger category.
Matter, client, and partner context.
Supporting values, info text, and info tags.
Whether the flag is silenced.
Available silence reasons.
Follow-up items.
Whether the item has been sent or opened.
Disposals or actions already taken.
The main recipient for the item.

Ayora exposes dashboard views for different users and scopes, including:

An individual employee.
A personal assistant's related partners.
Managers reviewing people, groups, departments, or matters.
Matter-filtered views.

Recipient routing is relationship-aware. A matter-partner flag may go to the matter partner or designated lead. PA follow-ups can go to the partner's PA. Billing-associate items use matter billing-associate relationships. Finance-manager items use finance-manager relationships, usually connected to the partner's practice group.

6. What Users Can Do With A Flag

Flags are intended to support a workflow, not just create a notification.

Depending on configuration and permissions, users may be able to:

Snooze or delay a flag.
Silence a flag with a reason or free-text explanation.
Enable or disable a follow-up.
Accelerate follow-ups.
Delegate a matter by setting a designated lead decision maker.
Update a matter budget.
Request a write-off.
Review whether related follow-ups or admin items have been created.

Ayora tracks these actions so teams can understand whether flags were acted on, delayed, superseded, or resolved through another workflow.

7. Why Flags May Disappear, Repeat, Or Be Delayed

A flag may no longer appear for several reasons:

It was delivered and is now in a cooldown period.
A user snoozed or silenced it.
A related matter-level action, such as a write-off request, silenced the matter.
A budget update silenced the originating budget flag.
A follow-up replaced or superseded the parent item.
The user is not the routed recipient.
The recipient has email delivery disabled or set to secondary-only.
The flag is filtered out of the current dashboard view.

A flag may repeat when the underlying signal is generated again after any relevant cooldown or silence has expired. Dashboard views may also deduplicate repeated signals so users see the latest relevant item rather than every historical instance.