When your brief arrives.
Your hour, your timezone, your channel. Plus the rule that catches everyone out: with no connected channel, ScoutRival doesn't generate a brief at all.
Your brief arrives at an hour you choose, in your timezone, in the channel you connected. This page covers how that's decided — and the two settings that catch people out.
No channel, no brief
If a brand has no connected delivery channel, ScoutRival does not generate its brief. The nightly job skips it entirely. This is not a bug — we don't spend your credits writing a brief into a void nobody asked to receive.
So if you're opening the app each morning to find “No brief yet for today”, the first thing to check is Channels. Connect Telegram, Slack or Discord, hit Test to prove it works, and tomorrow it starts arriving on its own.
You'll see a Connect Channels button in the Daily Brief header whenever this is the situation. That button is the app telling you exactly this.
You can still generate a brief by hand any time — the button is on the Daily Brief page. But you'd be doing that every day.
Setting your hour
The send time is set when you add a channel, not in Brief Settings. It's easy to look in the wrong place.
Go to Channels
Open the Channels page from the sidebar.
Pick the hour and the timezone
Both are on the add-a-channel form. We'll suggest your browser's timezone. A preview line shows exactly when the next brief will land — “Tomorrow, Mon Jul 13 at 9:00 AM”.
Save
That's it. The schedule is live from the next run.
Briefs are set on the hour. There's no half-past.
One schedule per brand
The send time belongs to the brand — not to each channel.
That means: if you add a second channel and pick a different hour, you have just moved the whole brand's brief to that hour. Both channels now send at the new time. The old channel's row may still display its original hour, but the real send time is the one you set last.
You can't, per channel — one brief per brand per day, sent everywhere at once. What you can do is run different brands on different schedules: each brand has its own send time, its own channels, and its own brief.
There's also no edit on a channel. To change the hour, the timezone, or a webhook URL, delete the channel and add it again. Re-adding it also rewrites the brand's schedule — which is usually what you wanted anyway.
Why it isn't to the minute
The scheduler wakes up on a cycle and asks “which brands are due?” A brand is due if its local time has passed the hour you set, within a 20-minute window.
In practice your brief lands within about twenty minutes of the hour. The window exists so that if the scheduler misses a beat, your brief still goes out that day instead of being skipped until tomorrow.
Once a day, your day
You get exactly one brief per brand per calendar day, measured in your timezone — not UTC.
That matters more than it sounds. Keying off your local calendar date is what stops the brief drifting or double-sending when your day and the server's day disagree across the midnight boundary. If a brief already exists for today, the scheduler delivers that one rather than generating a second.
Pausing — and what it stops
You can Pause any channel to stop delivery without deleting it.
A paused channel doesn't count as connected. So if it's your only channel, pausing it means the brand has no channel — and per the rule at the top of this page, the brief stops being generated at all, not just stops being delivered.
No brief arrived
Work down this list:
- Is a channel connected and not paused? This is the answer roughly nine times in ten.
- Did you hit Test? Slack and Discord webhooks are trusted the moment you paste them — nothing calls your webhook to verify it. A typo'd URL will show as connected and silently fail every morning. The test send is the only proof.
- Is Telegram still showing “pending”? You need to press Start in the bot, then refresh the Channels page — the status doesn't update on its own.
- Check Delivery history. The last twenty sends are listed at the bottom of the Channels page. A failed send shows a red warning icon — hover it for the actual error from the platform.
- Has the hour passed in your timezone? Not the server's.
Deliveries that fail are not retried, and nothing notifies you. The delivery history is where you find out — which is why the test send at setup time matters so much.