# Alerts and scheduled reports

Get a notification when labor runs hot, a vendor raises a price or a form reading is out of range, and have a labor, prime cost or vendor spend summary emailed every week or month.

For: Admins · On: Web · [Help Center](https://www.mays.app/help) › [Reports & insights](https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights) · Last updated October 13, 2026 · Mays Team

**Insights → Alerts & Reports** notifies you when a number crosses a line you set, and emails a weekly or monthly summary of labor, prime cost or vendor spend.

**Who:** admins. To let someone else see this page, give them a custom role with **View insights**. To let them create and change alerts and reports too, add **Manage alert rules & scheduled reports**. Insights is part of every plan. You set alerts up on the web; team members get them on their phone.

## Create an alert

1. Go to **Insights → Alerts & Reports** and click **New alert**. **Set Alert** on the **Labor Cost** and **Vendor Spend** pages opens the same window.
2. Pick the **Alert type** (see the table below).
3. Enter the threshold.
4. Under **Location scope**, choose **All locations**, or **Specific location** and pick one.
5. Choose who gets it:
   - **Team recipients:** tick people in your organization. They get a notification in the Mays app on their phone.
   - **Other email recipients:** type an email address and press **Enter**. They get an email.
6. Leave **Enabled** on and click **Create alert**.

![The New Alert window with Labor % Threshold picked from the four alert types (Vendor Price Change, Labor % Threshold, Count Variance, Task Form Field Threshold), Threshold 28%, Location scope Specific location South, Sam South ticked under Team recipients and owner@example.com under Other email recipients, with the Create alert button](https://mays-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/site/help__alerts-and-scheduled-reports__01-new-alert.448d1556b9.png)

| Alert type | When Mays checks | It fires when… |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Vendor Price Change** | Each time an invoice is posted with **Post & receive** | An item's price is up or down by at least your **Threshold (%)** since the last price from that vendor for the same pack. Items with no earlier price are skipped. You get one message per invoice, for example *3 price changes on Sunrise Dairy Co. invoice: Oat milk +11.4%, …* |
| **Labor % Threshold** | Once a morning, around 6 a.m. at each location, for the day before | Yesterday's labor cost was at or above your **Threshold (%)** of sales. It needs POS sales, so it never fires for a location without them. It fires at most once a day per location. |
| **Count Variance** | When a stock count is approved | The count differs from what was expected by more than your **Threshold ($)**. Each item's difference is priced like in recipes: at its imported cost if it has one, otherwise at its cheapest vendor price for that location. Counts can't be approved yet, so this alert doesn't fire for now. See [Running stock counts](https://www.mays.app/help/inventory/stock-counts). |
| **Task Form Field Threshold** | Each time someone submits a custom form in the app | A number on the form is **At or above** or **At or below** your threshold. Pick the **Task type** and the **Field**; only number fields are listed. It fires on every submission that crosses the line. See [Building custom forms](https://www.mays.app/help/tasks-checklists/custom-form-task-types). |

**Labor % tip:** the threshold starts at 10%, which most restaurants go over every day. Set it to the labor % you'd act on, such as 30%.

## Schedule a report

1. Click **New report**.
2. Pick the **Report**: **Labor Summary**, **Prime Cost** or **Vendor Spend**.
3. Pick the **Cadence**: **Weekly** or **Monthly**.
4. Under **Locations**, leave **All locations** to add up every location, or choose **Specific locations** and tick each location you want.
5. Choose **Team recipients** and **Other email recipients**, the same way as for an alert.
6. Click **Create report**.

![The New Scheduled Report window with Report Prime Cost, Cadence Weekly, Locations set to Specific locations with North and South ticked, Ava Admin ticked under Team recipients, owner@example.com under Other email recipients, Enabled on, and the Create report button](https://mays-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/site/help__alerts-and-scheduled-reports__02-new-scheduled-report.0378311cc6.png)

**When it arrives:**

- **Weekly:** every Monday, around 7 a.m., covering the previous Monday to Sunday.
- **Monthly:** on the 1st, around 7 a.m., covering the previous month.

The time is in your organization's time zone: the time zone of the first location you set up when you created your account. Each location's numbers still follow its own days.

**What's in it:**

| Report | Contents |
| --- | --- |
| **Labor Summary** | Total hours worked, labor cost and labor % of revenue, plus the five department and job title rows most over and most under their scheduled hours. |
| **Prime Cost** | Revenue, labor cost and %, food cost and %, prime cost %, and a day-by-day table. See [Prime cost](https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights/prime-cost). |
| **Vendor Spend** | Total spend across your vendors and invoices, your top five vendors, and the five biggest price changes. |

Email recipients get the whole report. Team recipients get a one-line summary as a notification, for example *Labor summary (…): 312.5h, $5234.00 (28.1% of revenue).*

## Who gets what

- **Team recipients** get a push notification and an entry in the app's notification list. They don't get an email. These notifications can't be switched off in the app's notification settings, and there's no list of them on the web.
- **Other email recipients** get an email with a button into Mays. In scheduled reports and **Labor % Threshold** alerts, that button goes to a page that doesn't exist yet, so sign in and open **Insights** from the sidebar instead.

To send a report or alert to a teammate by email, add their address under **Other email recipients**.

## Change, pause or delete

![The Alerts & Reports page: Alert rules with Vendor Price Change (Vendor price change ≥ 10% · All branches · 1 recipient) and Labor % Threshold (Labor cost ≥ 28% · South · 2 recipients), both Never fired, and Scheduled reports with a weekly Prime Cost report for 2 branches and 2 recipients, Never sent, each with an on/off switch and a ⋮ menu](https://mays-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/site/help__alerts-and-scheduled-reports__03-alerts-and-reports.ace62ddc79.png)

- The switch on each row pauses or restarts it. A paused one shows **Paused**.
- **⋮ → Edit** changes it; **⋮ → Delete** removes it after you confirm.
- The grey line shows when it last fired or was sent, or **Never fired** / **Never sent**.

There's no button to send a report or test an alert right away.

## Good to know

- **"All branches"** in the list means **All locations**.
- **With a custom role limited to some locations,** you have to pick one of your locations for each alert and report. Alerts and reports for all locations can only be changed by an admin.
- **A report covers what the person who created it can see.** **All locations** means all of them for an admin. If that person later manages only some locations, the report covers only those, and a location they no longer manage drops out. If their account is deactivated or deleted, the report stops being sent: delete it and create it again from your own account.
- **Recipients are checked every time something is sent.** A team recipient who has been deactivated or deleted, or has left your organization, gets nothing. An alert about one location only reaches team recipients who can see that location: admins, and the people assigned to it. So an alert for all locations reaches a location's own managers when that location crosses the threshold, and not the managers of other locations. The same goes for an email address that belongs to one of your team's Mays accounts. Addresses that don't belong to a Mays account always get it.
- **Labor % alerts** use the same numbers as [Prime cost](https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights/prime-cost): hours worked times wage, against net sales.
- **Custom form alerts** fire on every submission, including one sent again after a rejection. To see all the answers, use [Task Data](https://www.mays.app/help/tasks-checklists/task-data-export).

## Related articles

- Reports & insights: [Prime cost](https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights/prime-cost) — Prime Cost puts each day's sales next to its labor cost and theoretical food cost, and shows the share of sales each one takes. Web app, admins by default.
- Reports & insights: [Labor cost insights](https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights/labor-cost-insights) — Labor Cost compares staffing with sales hour by hour, scheduled hours with hours worked, and tracks labor cost as a share of sales over time. Web app, admins by default.
- Reports & insights: [Vendor spend](https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights/vendor-spend) — Vendor Spend totals what you spent with each vendor from posted invoices, shows it by week, month or quarter, and flags items whose price moved. Web app, admins by default.
- Inventory: [Vendor invoices](https://www.mays.app/help/inventory/vendor-invoices) — Record what vendors delivered and charged. Scan or photograph an invoice, upload its PDF, share it from your phone or email it in, and the AI drafts it; check the lines next to the document, then post it to add the stock and update your prices.
- Tasks & checklists: [Building custom forms (Task Types)](https://www.mays.app/help/tasks-checklists/custom-form-task-types) — Build your own task forms, like a cash count, a temperature log or a waste log, under Tasks → Types. Staff fill them in the app, and every answer lands in Task Data, ready to export.
- Tasks & checklists: [Task Data: viewing and exporting form answers](https://www.mays.app/help/tasks-checklists/task-data-export) — Tasks → Data lists every answer submitted on a custom form, like a cash count or temperature log, one row per submission, and downloads them as a CSV file.
- Inventory: [Running stock counts](https://www.mays.app/help/inventory/stock-counts) — A count records what's on your shelves. Submitting it sets each counted item's stock on hand and shows how far it was from what Mays expected.
- Mobile apps: [Notifications](https://www.mays.app/help/mobile-apps/push-notifications) — Mays notifies you in the app about shifts, tasks, approvals and chat. See them all under the bell, choose which ones reach your phone, and fix notifications that don't arrive.
- Team & roles: [Roles and permissions](https://www.mays.app/help/team-roles/roles-and-permissions) — What the built-in Admin, Manager and Employee roles can do, how location access works, and how to build a custom role from individual permissions.

## Still need help?

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[Contact support](https://www.mays.app/contact?topic=support) · [Call +1 (561) 286-3939](tel:+15612863939)

Canonical: https://www.mays.app/help/reports-insights/alerts-and-scheduled-reports