Escalation rules

Chasing contractors about overdue work is a daily job someone has to do. Escalation rules do it for you: once a day, each company gets an email listing their issues that are coming due or already late.

Required role: Project Manager (or Organization Admin).

How it works

Every day, Builddar looks at the project's open issues and their due dates, groups them by assigned company, and sends each company one digest email covering the rules that fired.

A rule is defined by:

• Timing — before due (a warning) or after due (a chase).
• Days offset — how many days before or after the due date the rule fires.
• Level — the order within its timing: level 1 is the first alert, level 2 the second.
• Recipients — see below.

note

A project can have up to 4 rules: two before due and two after due.

Set up escalation rules

1. Open the project's Settings and go to Escalation rules.
2. For each rule, set:
   • Timing — before or after the due date.
   • Days offset — for example 3 on a before due rule warns three days ahead.
   • Level — 1 or 2 within that timing.
   • Notify the company email — send to the company's own email address.
   • Notify company members — send to every project member belonging to that company.
   • CC — extra addresses, for example the project owner or a controller.
   • Active — whether the rule runs.
3. Save.

Result: the rules replace whatever was configured before, and start running on the next daily pass.

tip

A useful default set:

• 3 days before due — a heads-up while there's still time.
• 1 day after due — the first chase.
• 7 days after due, CC'd to the project owner — the escalation that gets attention.

Who receives what

Each company receives only its own issues. A digest never leaks another contractor's work. CC recipients receive the same per-company digest, which is what makes them useful for oversight — the project owner sees exactly what each contractor was told.

Turn escalations off

Set a rule to inactive to stop it without losing its configuration, or remove it entirely. With no active rules, no escalation emails are sent.

What escalations don't do

• They don't change issue statuses or priorities — they only inform.
• They don't replace personal notifications. A contractor can receive an assignment notification and appear in a later escalation digest.
• They only cover issues with a due date and an assigned company. An issue with neither can never escalate.

caution

An unassigned issue never escalates. If work is quietly slipping and nobody is being chased, check that the issues actually have an assigned company and a due date — see Assign and track issues.

Next steps

• Project notification rules
• Assign and track issues