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Overview
Most of what Overdesk does happens on a timer. Once your help desk, your Anthropic API key and your docs are in place, it refreshes your knowledge base overnight, drafts new conversations every 15 minutes and sends your reports, without anyone pressing a button.
This page lists what runs on its own and when. Times are in your workspace time zone, or UTC when none is set.
What runs automatically
Overdesk creates each of these schedules for you as soon as the thing it needs is in place, usually within a minute. You never have to add them yourself.
Knowledge base syncs
| Automation | When it runs | Created once |
|---|---|---|
| Sync past conversations | Daily at 03:00 | a help desk is connected |
| Sync documentation | Daily at 04:00 | a docs URL is set in Settings → Knowledge base |
| Sync help desk docs | Daily at 04:30 | Help Scout (with its Docs API key), Zendesk or Intercom is connected |
| Sync Notion pages | Daily at 04:45 | Notion is connected |
| Sync Google Docs | Daily at 04:48 | Google Docs is connected |
| Sync GitHub issues | Daily at 04:50 | GitHub is connected |
| Sync Linear issues | Daily at 04:55 | Linear is connected |
| Sync support forums | Daily at 05:00 | WordPress.org plugin slugs are saved in Settings → Knowledge base |
| Sync Jira issues | Daily at 05:05 | Jira is connected |
Drafting, triage and reports
Every schedule in this table is created once your Anthropic API key is saved.
| Automation | When it runs | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-draft replies | Every 15 minutes | Drafts replies for open conversations and leaves them unsent in your help desk for your team to review. |
| Auto-triage | Every 6 hours | Classifies incoming conversations by product, type and urgency. |
| Score drafts against replies | Daily at 06:30 | Compares each draft with the reply your agent actually sent, and tags the conversation in your help desk. |
| Morning briefing | Daily at 07:00 | Your start-of-day list of the conversations waiting longest for a reply. |
| Follow-up nudges | Daily at 09:00 | Drafts a follow-up note for conversations that have been waiting with no reply. |
| Weekly summary | Mondays at 08:00 | The week's numbers against the week before. |
| Weekly insights email | Wednesdays at 09:00 | What Overdesk did for your team this week, also emailed to owners and admins. |
Auto-draft replies also needs a documentation source before it drafts anything. See Point Overdesk at your docs. Follow-up nudges don't use your docs, so they start as soon as the key is in.
On the Assist plan, the Morning briefing is not created: Assist includes the Weekly summary and the Weekly insights email. Trial, Pro and Scale workspaces get every schedule above. See Plans and pricing.
A default schedule runs once as soon as it is created, then on its cadence. That is why the first drafts, triage and reports arrive shortly after you finish setup rather than at the next scheduled time.
What never runs on its own
Close stale conversations is never scheduled for you. It closes conversations in your help desk, so it only runs once an admin adds a schedule for it or runs it by hand.
Every other report and every analysis runs when someone asks for it, or on a schedule you add. See Report types and Analyses.
What automations never do
Nothing on a schedule messages a customer. Drafts and follow-up nudges arrive unsent, as an internal note by default, and wait for a person on your team. The one exception is a FreeScout draft reply on an API and Webhooks module older than 1.0.103, which may be sent: see Where drafts go.
Some automations do write to your help desk: Auto-draft replies and Follow-up nudges place their drafts and tag the conversation, Auto-draft replies also assigns a conversation when a guardrail rule with someone under Hand over to matches, Auto-triage and Score drafts against replies add tags, and Close stale conversations closes conversations. The Allowed inboxes setting decides which inboxes they may work in. See Allowed inboxes.